Gardner Luzzatto
Nina

Nina Luzzatto Gardner is the director of Strategy International, a corporate sustainability advisory firm she founded in 2000. She works with companies to improve their commitment to sustainability and the SDGs, and with US investors to better understand Environmental, Social & Governance risks in their portfolios. Some of her major corporate clients have been Pfizer, ENEL SpA, and Terna SpA, where she worked as a consultant to the Sustainability, CSR, and Investor Relations departments. She has been teaching Corporate Sustainability, Business & Human Rights as an adjunct professor in the international law department at Johns Hopkins SAIS in Washington DC since 2013, and at the Washington College of Law at American University since 2009.

Over the years Ms. Gardner has advised a number of international organizations. She was a political and human rights officer in the Balkans for the UN Office of Peacekeeping in the late ‘90s and later was active in engaging a number of companies with the newly organized UN Global Compact – where she helped launch the CFO sustainability working group. She has worked on different projects at the OECD, specifically with the OECD’s Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies, and the OECD women’s entrepreneurship MENA program. A lawyer by training, she practiced corporate law in Washington DC with the firm of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue. Her varied professional experiences convinced her that the best way to effectuate change is to encourage the public, private sector and civil society to work together – and that business can turn human rights and environmental challenges into profitable opportunities.

Ms Gardner is on the advisory board of the Women’s Forum for the Economy in Society, the Scientific Committee of the Alleanza Italiana per lo Sviluppo Sostenibile (ASviS), helped start the Harvard Coalition for Responsible Investment, and is a founding board member of Farm from a Box – an AG tech start up. She is a graduate of Harvard-Radcliffe, Columbia Law School and was a Rotary scholar at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotà, Colombia. A US and Italian national, Ms. Gardner is fluent in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, is a member of the New York Bar and the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a frequent moderator on issues relating to business and human rights, sustainability, energy, water, climate change, women’s entrepreneurship, and responsible investing, and is a frequent guest lecturer at a number of masters programs and law schools.