What drives you? The need to preserve and protect the environment for my children and their children. Total cliché but that’s what drives cold fear into my heart!
What projects do you work on that you love or are most passionate about and why? I work on a wide spectrum of projects, ranging from compliance reviews and audits to strategic work around integrating human rights responses into the business operations as well as carbon offsets strategy development and implementation. I love them all for different reasons –compliance-based work enables us to assist organisations run their business as mandated by law and in line with integrity standards that are attracting such attention these days, and the strategic pieces because it really means that you get an opportunity to shift thinking and practices towards sustainability for the long term.
Career highlight/game changing project/something that made a big impact: I’ve had a few of those, but I think the most relevant for the here and now is becoming a mother and moving countries. Both of these events brought about big career changes.

Michaela Young
Principal Consultant
Brief info
Michaela is an Environmental and Planning Law expert with over 10 years' experience. She has practised law as well as taught and researched in the area of law at the University of Cape Town, South Africa and holds a Bachelor of Laws and Master of Law in Environmental Law. Her previous work focused on environmental and planning approval processes and litigation, and her research spanned the intersection between Human-rights and environmental law and policy. Michaela works across our Nature Based Solutions and Human Rights teams. She focuses on strategic advice on the Offsets strategy component of Net Zero Strategies, as well as carbon project origination advisory. She has extensive experience auditing carbon projects under the Emissions Reduction Fund. On our Human Rights team, Michaela leads governance and compliance-related aspects of projects, as well as policy and strategy development to support organisations embed a rights-based approach into their operations.
Academic Qualifications: Bachelor Law; Master of Law; LLM (EnvLaw)
Industry Qualifications: Mini MBA