Carbon Removal in a Beyond Value Chain Mitigation Strategy

Dr. Atreya has worked in climate technology research and strategic advisory since 2009. She was the lead author of Bioresources within a Net-Zero Emissions Economy, a report by the Energy Transitions Commission evaluating the role of sustainable bioresources in climate change mitigation. While at SYSTEMIQ, a sustainability-focused systems change company, Meera provided strategic advice to a major climate-focused philanthropic foundation and co-authored a report on alleviating the plastic waste crisis; the United Nations Environment Programme is currently using this analysis as the basis for a global plastics treaty. Prior to SYSTEMIQ, Meera was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, where she was designated as an Affiliate Expert in Renewable Energy & Cleantech and was a key member of the team that steered McKinsey to address its own global carbon emissions. 

Meera is based in London and is an advisor to Carbon Gap and former Technical Advisory Group Member of the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi). She holds a PhD in Chemistry (Chemical Biology) from UC Berkeley and an A.B. cum laude from Harvard. Dr. Atreya was awarded a US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for her doctoral research on engineering enzymes to improve the efficiency, and lower the cost, of converting cellulosic biomass to 2^nd-generation biofuels.

Mila has professional and academic experience spanning carbon markets, climate-smart agriculture, and net-zero strategy. Prior to joining Relae, Mila worked at Climate Impact Partners, where she conducted strategic research on corporate sustainability and the voluntary carbon market. There she developed a deep understanding of the role of nature-based carbon removal in credible private sector climate strategies. Her work spanned the impacts of regulatory and market initiatives on carbon credit demand and corporate claims, such as Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative (VCMI), and the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi). Before Climate Impact Partners, she worked as a Summer Analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), where she conducted client-facing research on the economics and carbon storage potential of regenerative agriculture in the United States. Mila holds an MS in Energy Systems and Data Analytics from University College London and a BA in Economics and Geography from Trinity College Dublin. In her postgraduate degree, her work focused on using machine learning models to forecast global crop yields under different climate scenarios.