Edwin P. Nerva - SEP Case Story

Edwin Nerva is the AVP for Sustainability at Nickel Asia Corporation, where he leads the company’s sustainability strategy, stakeholder engagement, and community development efforts. With over 15 years of experience across the corporate, nonprofit, and international development sectors, His work focuses on integrating sustainable practices into core business operations while advancing inclusive growth and environmental resilience across rural and mining communities in the Philippines.


What brought you to this moment in your career where the Sustainability Excellence Professional (SEP) made sense for you? 


Sustainability is a dynamic and evolving field that requires a solid foundation and continuous learning. Earning the Sustainability Excellence Professional (SEP) credential made sense to me because it not only deepened my understanding of sustainability fundamentals but also brought together my diverse background and experiences. Additionally, ISSP community offers valuable opportunities to connect with like-minded professionals, fostering collaboration and ongoing growth in the field. I saw it as a vital step to strengthen my expertise and stay at the forefront of sustainability practices.


How are you putting the knowledge, skills, and ability demonstrated in the SEP to work in your career (or work) today?


The learnings and knowledge gained from SEP credential are important in my current role as the demands of my job require a comprehensive and integrated approach to sustainability. The competencies I gained through SEP guide my performance and that of my team, driving us to achieve better outcomes in our sustainability initiatives.


For those starting out in the sustainability field, what advice do you have for them?


Sustainability is a challenging field, especially with everything happening around us today. However, nothing is impossible if we work together and collaborate. My advice for those just starting out in sustainability is to always stay curious and open to learning. Continuous learning not only enhances your skills but also strengthens the collective effort toward achieving meaningful and impactful sustainability outcomes. 

Interested in earning your SEA credential? Download our free sample of the SEA Study Guide or sign up for the next SEA Study Cohort.

Read perspectives from the ISSP blog

You're doing the work. But are you building capacity for change?

By Jacqueline Kerr, PHD • May 27, 2026
May 2026 We spend enormous energy telling people what needs to change, and very little time thinking about how change actually happens. Most sustainability efforts inside organizations are built around the individual. Convince the right person. Model the right behavior. Win the argument in the room. And to be fair, that approach gets things moving. Until it doesn't. The real barrier isn't information. It isn't even intent. It's the conditions we create for people to change together. What I'm seeing in the most effective organizations isn't individual champions doing heroic work. It's something more structural: well-designed groups where people shift together, hold each other accountable, and build something that doesn't collapse when one person leaves the room.

Regenerative Partnerships in Supply Chains: From Good Intentions to Real Change

By Nitesh Dullabh • April 28, 2026
April 2026 I walked away from a recent webinar with a lingering thought: we’ve spent years improving supply chains, but very little time truly rethinking them. Most of the systems we rely on today were built for efficiency - to move goods faster, cheaper, at scale. And to be fair, they’ve done that remarkably well. But they were never designed for the complexity we’re now facing: climate volatility, geopolitical and tariff uncertainty, water stress, soil degradation, and widening inequities across supply chains. So what do we do? We add layers - more audits, more reporting, more standards. Necessary? Yes. Sufficient? Not really. The deeper issue is not performance - it’s creating healthy conditions for design and structure. What I’m seeing instead, and what I believe is the real shift underway, is the move toward regenerative partnerships . Not transactional relationships, but systems of collaboration that are designed to endure, adapt, and regenerate value over time through and with relational relationships. 

Two Courses, One Mission: Building Sustainability Practitioners Who Are Ready to Act

By By Amy Hall, MSc, Education Lead, TripleWin Advisory • March 23, 2026
March 23, 2026 I spend a lot of time thinking about how we teach sustainability. Not just the what , but the how and why . At TripleWin Advisory , a woman-founded, -owned, and -led sustainability consultancy and registered public benefit company, we believe real progress on circularity requires more than good intentions. It requires practitioners who are genuinely equipped to act. That conviction is what led us to develop two courses now available through ISSP: Cultivate and Mitigate . Both courses have since been adopted by universities and are reaching sustainability students across the country. Knowing what went into building them makes me want to share the story behind each one. Mitigate: Built From Practice, Not Textbooks Mitigate was created from hands-on work with partners tackling one of the most pressing issues in sustainability: food waste. Reducing food waste is consistently ranked among the highest-impact solutions to climate change, and yet it remains one of the most underfunded and under-addressed areas in the field. TripleWin Advisory has worked with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment (PCFWC) , a public-private partnership whose frameworks were ultimately adopted at the national level. Those assets, that research, and those hard-won insights form the backbone of Mitigate. When we talk about food waste reduction strategies in this course, we're drawing on frameworks that have been tested and refined in real supply chains and policy environments. For learners who want to do this work professionally, that grounding matters. The University of Wisconsin has integrated Mitigate into their undergraduate and graduate sustainability programs, which speaks to what the course offers academically: rigorous, applied content that bridges the classroom and the field.
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