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Two sustainability professionals who met at C4C 25 share the challenges and opportunities they each face, the value of collaboration, and where the term sustainability falls short.
Kyra Ferber and Kellyanne Perez-Vera met last fall at PCMA’s C4C (Convene 4 Climate) in Rotterdam, which brought together more than 100 events industry experts, leaders, and entrepreneurs from multiple organizations and industries to the Netherlands to share their expertise and experience around sustainability and events.
The two women bonded after discovering that they held similar roles at two very different high-profile global corporations — Ferber, vice president for ESG (environmental, social, and governance) at Universal Music Group (UMG), and Perez-Vera, marketing sustainability director for Mastercard. Ferber and Perez-Vera share another thing in common beyond their events-related positions — they both work in a field where the number of women who hold leadership positions is twice the global average.
Earlier this year, Ferber and Perez-Vera continued their conversation during a Convening Leaders session moderated by Tanya Popeau, PCMA’s head of global sustainability, where they discussed the hurdles they face, the value of collaboration, and how they make an impact. Along the way, they offered a look into their day-to-day experience navigating challenges that are familiar to many of those working to make events more sustainable.
About their jobs
Perez-Vera: My role is very niche and was created specifically to ensure that Mastercard reaches its net-zero ambitions. When I started, my role was focusing on creating the strategy to decarbonize within global media, all of the social platforms, media, and production — what’s happening on an actual shoot. My role expanded, and I now oversee the strategy for decarbonization across meetings and travel.
Kyra Ferber: I’m vice president of ESG over at UMG, the world’s largest music company — whoever your favorite artist is, they probably have some connection to UMG. Within UMG, I help lead our ESG and sustainability strategy. My second day job is leading our ESG and sustainability compliance. We’re a Dutch parent company operating in 60 countries, so, from a compliance perspective, there’s a lot of interesting — and sometimes conflicting — problems to solve.
On making progress on sustainability
Perez-Vera: I think first and foremost, [for] everyone within sustainability, you have to start somewhere. I think there are a lot of brands, a lot of companies that are saying, well, things aren’t figured out yet, I’ll wait until everything gets figured out. Nothing gets done unless you’re the one willing to take that leap of faith.
The second thing is to partner with vendors and suppliers that are also passionate — the [event consulting company] Maritz team had said they wanted to pilot measuring events and understanding their carbon footprint. And I always say, “I’d love to be your guinea pig.”
The beautiful thing about this [sustainability] space is that whoever you’re speaking with, it’s: “Let’s sit and have a conversation. How are you measuring your impact? Where have you seen hotspots?” It’s a space where we’re all willing to share and grow together.
Ferber: It’s about understanding first, where are stakeholders coming from, what are their key concerns, and then translating that into our ambitions as a company. Asking, what does that mean across different stakeholder groups?
Just because someone is interested in sustainability doesn’t mean they have the same language that sustainability professionals have. So getting management and the board up to speed on what is net zero, what is SBTi [Science Based Targets initiative], what is CDP [the Carbon Disclosure Project] — what are all these acronyms and do we have to have any of them?
A core part of our success is that sustainability is a priority for our stakeholders. Our artists care a lot about it. Their fans increasingly are really interested in it, and as a result, our management and our board and our employees are all really invested.
On making an impact
Ferber: At UMG, we’ve really seen firsthand how not just powerful but also necessary it is to collaborate across industries. We don’t put on live events, but we know that if we’re going to make any kind of difference, that’s where it is. This year, we launched a huge partnership with our nonprofit partner Reverb.org [dedicated to sustainability in the music industry]. We advise [Reverb] on things like sustainable merch, and they can take that information to everyone they work with. And in turn, they’re really helping our artists put on shows that are as sustainable as possible or as sustainable as the artist is ready to be.
Perez-Vera: I am proud to say in our 2024 impact report that our company grew by 16 percent in revenue and we reduced our carbon footprint by 7 percent. It’s a big deal, because the story has been told that the higher your revenue increases, the more carbon-intensive your business becomes. And we’re demystifying that by optimizing our strategy and working with our suppliers to ensure that they’re also decarbonizing. I think a lot of it is just being brave to start that conversation and just hold hands together as we figure it out.
On where sustainability goes from here
Ferber: It is really about collaboration and staying connected. It’s the small decisions that add up to a large movement. If we steer the big ship one degree, that makes a massive difference. And, I think increasingly, moving sustainability from a lone ranger into every single line of business is just kind of the norm. My goal is — I hate to say this out loud — that in 10 years I don’t have a standalone department or role. Sustainability is baked into business as usual, and that change is integrated into everything we do.
Perez-Vera: I’m going to be a rebel. I think we should do away with the word “sustainability” because it’s an anomaly. This should be the new norm — it should just be the right thing to do. I like saying “impact” more than “sustainability,” because sustainability can mean a lot of things. So the biggest thing is rebranding what sustainability is, so people realize it’s not the standalone department that’s in the corner, emailing us again. It’s baked into every conversation.
Growing Female Leaders
When PCMA’s Tanya Popeau began to look for sustainability leaders to speak at the 2025 Convene 4 Climate (C4C) event, she encountered a problem that’s rare in the business events industry: She had to work really hard, she said, to find male speakers.
Ferber and Perez-Vera are part of a broader shift in who is leading sustainability work. The growing number of women holding executive leadership positions in sustainability is a long-term trend, according to the “State of the Sustainability Profession 2024,” published by the Trellis Group. In 2010, 31 percent of vice presidents were female, a number that more than doubled to 63 percent in 2024. The report estimated that 64 percent of the office jobs in sustainability in 2024 were held by women, based on the demographics of report’s survey respondents.
By comparison, PCMA’s “Advancing Women in Business Events” report, published in 2024, cited IBTM research that found that only 16 percent of women hold leadership roles in the global events industry, while 77 percent of the global event-management workforce is women.
Researchers have pointed to a variety of reasons for the large number of female sustainability professionals in leadership roles, including the fact that sustainability is a relatively new field, something Maria Mendiluce, CEO of We Mean Business Coalition — a group of seven nonprofits working with businesses to accelerate transitions to net-zero emissions — pointed out in a BBC article. When chief sustainability officers (CSOs) “began being introduced in businesses,” she said, the role “came without the trappings of a traditionally male or female domain.”
A post on Yale University’s website on climate change suggested a broader influence at work: Research indicates that women are more likely than men to be concerned about the environment. “Scholars have proposed several explanations for this gender gap,” write the researchers in the Yale post, “including differences in gender socialization and resulting value systems (e.g., altruism, compassion), perceptions of general risk and vulnerability, and feminist beliefs including commitment to egalitarian values of fairness and social justice.”
Barbara Palmer is Convene’s deputy editor