Larissa Brown

Larissa Brown is the 2008 Australian Young Environmentalist of the Year. She is the founder and executive director of the Centre for Sustainability Leadership, a non profit organisation dedicated to supporting Australians to make their communities, workplaces and sectors more sustainable. She is the recipient of the 2006 British Council award for Communicating Climate Change and the 2006 Brian Robinson Fellowship. Larissa has personally interviewed 100 of world's greatest sustainability leaders across twenty countries and 5 continents on what it take to cause real systemic change towards a sustainable world. Larissa was named as one of Melbourne 100 most influential people and one of Melbourne's ten most influential environmentalists by The Age Magazine in 2007.

She is a board member of Environment Victoria, Victoria's peak environmental group, was selected represent Asian and Pacific youth at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali in 2007 and will be attending the negotiations in Poland in November 2008. She is a judge in the Eureka awards for Youth Leadership on Climate Change, a member of the Ministers Reference Council on Climate Change Adaptation which advisors the state Environment Minister and participated in the Prime Minister's 2020 Summit in 2008.

Larissa has worked as a research scientist at the Australian National University, studying the extinction event of Australia's megafauna, helped save a forest by creating an ecotourism lodge in Costa Rica, rehabilitated endangered primates and big cats in Bolivia, taught snowboarding in the USA and spent a year as a high school student in Japan.