Heather Loebner
Senior Advisor, Sustainability
Heather Loebner creates big-picture strategy, delivering on-the-ground, regionally relevant results. She has scaled impact-driven results, reduced enterprise risk in ever-evolving regulatory and reputational conditions, and consistently delivered financial value and increased the resiliency of operations. She has stood up sustainability, social impact, and governance functions from the ground up, then turned them into measurable business results, impacting P&L. With nearly three decades of leadership at Fortune 100 companies and blue-chip brands, including Kuehne+Nagel, ArcelorMittal, HSBC, and PwC, Ms. Loebner has launched first-of-their-kind strategies; developed global stakeholder engagement frameworks, applied to build critical relationships; reduced enterprise risk; and created commercial value. Her winning results have earned her credibility from the C-Suite to the shop floor, Wall Street to NGOs. She has led financial turnarounds at two nonprofits, one from multi-year deficits and a second from stagnant, unfocused growth to stable enterprises with renewed strategic direction.
Ms. Loebner’s industry experience spans hard-to-abate sectors such as transportation, supply chain, metals and mining, heavy manufacturing, energy, technology, healthcare, food and agriculture. She also has experience in financial services, conservation, and the arts. She has deep expertise in climate strategy, decarbonization, responsible sourcing, circularity, biodiversity, and human rights across global enterprises and value chains. She is adept at convening diverse stakeholders on complex agendas to deliver aligned priorities and actions.
At Kuehne+Nagel, she scaled low-carbon commercial transportation solutions (sea, air, road) offerings across a 400,000-customer portfolio, delivering ~35% carbon reductions against customers’ SBTi targets. She developed scenario planning to scale electric vehicles and deployed sustainable aviation and marine fuels as part of clean-tech solutioning while reducing risk within the value chain. Within Kuehne+Nagel’s contract logistics business, Ms. Loebner cut customer packaging and supply chain costs by millions, utilizing a kaizen, continuous-improvement approach to achieve zero-plastic. Her sustainable supply chain thought leadership produced a record 60% open rate and grew client visibility by more than 45%. Heading sustainability for CircleIT, a B Corp, Ms. Loebner framed substantial value focused on electronics circularity, with a special focus on rare earth minerals and zero e-waste. At ArcelorMittal, she leveraged her internal and external stakeholder relationship strengths to secure $31.2M in DOE match funding for a $63.2M energy recovery project that cut annual GHG emissions by 340,000 tons of CO₂, added 38 MW of on-site electricity, and delivered $20M in operational cost savings, work that contributed to earning five consecutive U.S. EPA Energy Star Partner of the Year Awards. She conceived Sustain Our Great Lakes, an award-winning public-private partnership that has delivered ~$350 million in on-the-ground conservation impact to date, and achieved reputational turnaround and operational efficiency improvements across multiple business sites. As a corporate and foundation philanthropy executive, she has directed more than $125M in funding to NGOs to create local and global impact.
Ms. Loebner serves on the Corporate Advisory Board of Shiki Wrap, a woman-owned sustainable gift wrap start-up. She is also a frequent speaker and author on stakeholder engagement, materiality, decarbonization, resilient supply chains, partnerships, and collective impact, and has been featured at Gartner, GreenBiz, TrellisImpact, Reuters, and NAEM; interviewed on PBS; and featured on S&P Global’s All Things Sustainable podcast.
Education
M.S. – Political Science, University of Illinois
B.A. – Business, St. Louis University
Community Leadership
Treasurer and Board Member, Lower East Side Ecology Center, New York City
Guest Lecturer, New York University, University of Chicago, and Indiana University
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