“There must be a better way to make the things we want, a way that doesn’t spoil the sky, or the rain or the land.” - Paul McCartney
The post-Soviet energy crisis
My connection to sustainability was formed in Armenia in the 1990s, a period marked by the challenges of the post-Soviet energy crisis. Electricity was limited to a few hours a day, gas pipelines were cut, and families burned whatever they could find to stay warm wood from forests, scraps of furniture, even plastic.
Within a short time, landscapes that had once been green were stripped bare. Hydropower became the only stable energy source, straining rivers and lowering Lake Sevan. Fields eroded, ecosystems weakened. And although energy eventually returned, the environmental impact remained visible for decades.
Very early on, I saw that sustainability functions as an interconnected system and when it breaks, every part of society is impacted.
Can technology solve the problem?
Years later, after moving to the Netherlands and completing my studies, I began working in the solar PV industry with a company focused on accelerating the transition to renewable energy. At the time, solar PV was rapidly scaling, driven by falling technology costs and growing corporate demand including the launch of initiatives such as RE100, which brought together major companies committed to sourcing 100% renewable electricity.
Contributing to Europe’s energy transition often brought my thoughts back to Armenia, and to how different the 1990s might have been with access to clean, reliable energy. Technology can address many challenges but it also raised a broader question: is sustainability only about technology?
Over time, the answer became clear. Sustainability is a system shaped not just by technology, but by people, processes, governance, culture, strategy, and the ability to connect these elements through systems thinking.
But how do all these pieces connect?
How do all the pieces connect?
This curiosity to understand how sustainability works in practice led me to the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) in 2019, where I completed the Business Sustainability Management program. It marked a turning point in my career, giving structure and language to the systems perspective I had been developing through experience. One publication in particular Rewiring the Economy: Ten Tasks, Ten Years strongly shaped my thinking, clearly articulating how economic systems must evolve to deliver long-term value. While the original ten-year horizon is nearing its end, the report remains highly relevant today.
Since then, I have continued to deepen my expertise and focus on how sustainability can be embedded into real-world execution. This includes formal training and certifications such as Sustainability Excellence Associate (SEA), Green Project Management (GPM-b™), and additional education in renewable energy, strategy execution, and transformation.
Together, this combination of lived experience, formal study, and hands-on work enables me to bridge sustainability strategy with practical, measurable execution.