Our first podcast guests in March are Elissama Menezes, a climate and shipping consultant and the Global Director of the Say No to LNG campaign, and Dr Melissa Lem, a Vancouver-based physician who is President of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.

Elissama has ‘field experience’ as a deckhand working and living in a vessel designed to be a green ship, running primarily on wind power. In her role with the Say No to LNG campaign, she coordinates a growing network of global technical experts mobilising stakeholders toward a methane-free shipping industry. 

Elissama supports NGOs and the maritime sector in the consultant space with research, advocacy, strategising, and engagement with communities and international forums. 

An oceanographer by training and having a Master's in Marine Management, she makes it her mission to work towards ambitious, long-term, and sustainable changes and solutions for people, the ocean, and the planet.

As President of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, Melissa has engaged in advocacy and policy work on a broad range of issues, from climate change and hydraulic fracturing to sustainable health care and low-carbon transportation.  

Her work has appeared in media including the CBC, Vancouver Sun, Toronto Star, Montreal Gazette, The Narwhal and National Observer. As a climate change panellist on CBC Radio's Early Edition, an in-house medical columnist for CBC TV Vancouver and Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, one of her major priorities is knowledge translation. 

Melissa was the inaugural winner of University College’s Young Alumni of Influence Award at the University of Toronto, the recipient of the 2022 Adult Nature Inspiration Award from the Canadian Museum of Nature, and a 2021 World Parks Week Ambassador. 

She sits on the Advisory Committee of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas Health and Well-being Specialist Group.