Jia Yen Lai

Dr. Jia Yen Lai is the Associate Director of Innovation and Partnerships at SAI, where she leads the organization’s strategic responses to the evolving intersection of labor rights and environmental sustainability. With a PhD in Geography and over 15 years of experience spanning academia, civil society, and corporate ESG consultancy, she specializes in building human rights-based resilience within global supply chains.

Her current work is centered on the Just Transition, specifically how climate adaptation, economic decarbonization, and digital transformation impact business, workers, and community. She bridges the gap between research and practice by developing operational-level framework and tools, ensuring worker rights and safety in shifting economies and community participation and engagement in the context of emerging mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence.

She's an Honorary Researcher of Global Studies at Monash University Malaysia and a Commission Member of the IUCN Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy (CEESP). Previously, she spent nine years as the co-founder and Executive Director of a business consultancy, bringing a pragmatic, multi-stakeholder lens to her current focus on advancing rights-based approaches to global sustainability.