Jim Hanna

In his 30 years in sustainability, Jim Hanna has become a passionate industry expert in driving companies to link their investments in sustainability directly to business outcomes. As one of the pioneers advancing the “business case for sustainability” he’s spent his career working to help companies move beyond anecdotal, qualitative and non-business metrics to justify and compete internally with other business priorities for their sustainability and community investments. In the last several years, he applied that expertise and business-linkage lens to the area of corporate community investments, a field that is still essentially a philanthropic endeavor at most companies. He’s built a groundbreaking methodology to quantify community thriving, link investments to substantive community impacts, and monetize the ROI of corporate community investments

Jim joined Microsoft in 2006 as the company’s first director of datacenter sustainability, providing strategic environmental direction in the fields of land-use, green building, energy, and water to the company’s growing cloud computing platform. He then transitioned for a few years to lead the company’s focus on urban planning and community prosperity in its datacenter communities around the world. Today, he’s back in the sustainability world, answering the company’s call to lead decarbonization of the Microsoft’s datacenter design, construction and supply chain efforts – their biggest challenge to meeting the industry’s most ambitious Scope 3 reduction targets.

Previously, Jim served as chief sustainability officer for Starbucks, leading company’s global sustainability mission in green building, energy conservation, and circular economy, in addition to serving as Starbucks external environmental policy voice and advocate on Capitol Hill.

Prior to Starbucks, Jim served as Director of Environmental Affairs for Xanterra Parks & Resorts at Yellowstone National Park.

A native of Washington state, Jim earned a BS in Environmental Sciences from Washington State University and is a U.S. Green Building Council LEED-accredited professional. He serves on the advisory councils UN-Habitat, the Yellowstone Park Foundation, and the Washington State University College of Arts and Sciences Advisory Council, plus the boards of directors of the Better Block Foundation and Net Impact.