Iris Van der Veken is Executive Director & Secretary General of the Watch and Jewellery Initiative 2030 (co-founded by Kering and Cartier, delegated by Richemont) and Member of 100 Women @Davos’ Inclusive Leadership Council. She has a background in law, public affairs and sustainability. Iris has over 25’ years experience on the ground in India, China, Africa, Thailand, Sri Lanka, working on the sustainability agenda as a driver for business resilience. She has worked across the supply chain on many topics including human rights due diligence, decent labour, environmental standards implementation, and traceability. Iris has been an active ambassador on gender and women’s rights for the industry, which have resulted in shaping strong partnerships with UN Women on gender equality and gender responsive procurement. She was the first chairwoman under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of UN Global Compact Belgium. Iris is known as a strong coalition builder and now has been the Executive Director of WJI 2030 since 2022.
Following discussions at Zurich Climate Week around the growing gap between ambition and implementation, where do you believe the watch and jewellery industry is currently making the strongest progress – and where is greater momentum still needed?
The most significant progress today is being made in the areas of climate resilience and nature & biodiversity. When the Initiative was founded in 2022 by Kering and Cartier, delegated by Richemont, it was built around three interconnected pillars: Climate, Nature & Biodiversity, and Inclusiveness (covering Human Rights and Gender Equality).
Since then, we have observed that while many companies have advanced on climate, far fewer have begun their journey on nature, water, and biodiversity. This is partly because nature-related risks are less immediately visible. However, they are equally critical, as they directly impact ecosystem stability, water availability, and the livelihoods of communities.
At the Watch & Jewellery Initiative 2030, we developed:
• The Nature Roadmap provides practical guidance to help companies moving toward a nature-positive future, with frameworks, best practices and evolving insights that reflect the fast-changing nature-business landscape.
• The Nature Action Playbook is a practical toolkit of 20 concrete steps covering strategy, governance, resourcing and supply chain action. Each step is linked to clear guidance and outcome expectations, with tailored support for SMEs to help bridge capacity gaps. It was piloted with members in 2025 and went open source in 2026.
• The Nature Proof of Concept, launched in April 2026, demonstrates how businesses have operationalised the Playbook – showcasing real-world examples of progress and practical guidance to inspire others.
• The Water Stewardship Guide and Assessment Tool, launched in March 2026, gives companies a structured, science-based approach to:
- identify and assess water-related risks,
- set clear priorities and targets,
- and implement action both within their operations and at basin level.
The importance of this work is becoming increasingly evident. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026, drawing on the views of more than 1,300 experts worldwide, finds that environmental risks dominate the long-term outlook, with extreme weather events ranking as the number one global risk over the next decade, followed by biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and critical changes to Earth systems. Five of the top ten long-term risks identified are environmental. The Circularity Gap Report 2025 shows that more than 90% of biodiversity loss and around 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions are linked to how we extract and use materials. At the same time, the OECD’s Global Drought Outlook (June 2025) confirms that droughts are becoming more frequent and severe globally, with cascading impacts on communities, ecosystems and economies.
Encouragingly, nature is moving from the edge of the corporate agenda to its centre. As of September 2025, more than 730 organisations have adopted the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), including 179 financial institutions managing approximately USD 22.4 trillion in assets.
Where greater momentum is needed
Now, the key priority is clear: building capacity across the supply chain and bringing along all the SMEs.
While progress on climate – and growing momentum on nature and water – is encouraging, the key gap today remains implementation. The priority now is scaling action across the value chain, especially by bringing SMEs along. Suppliers are the backbone of the industry, yet many face capacity, resource, and regulatory challenges. Supporting them through practical tools, capacity building, and long-term partnerships is essential.
At the same time, greater alignment is needed to reduce fragmentation, and sustainability must move beyond silos to be embedded across all business functions – from procurement to design to leadership.
Ultimately, the next phase is about scale: moving from ambition to execution, and from individual efforts to full value-chain transformation.
WJI 2030 has brought together stakeholders from across the value chain around the pillars of Climate Resilience, Preserving Resources and Fostering Inclusiveness. Why do you believe collaborative, industry-wide approaches are becoming increasingly important in today’s environment?
Collaboration is no longer optional, it is the only way forward.
Across the watch and jewellery value chain, companies often source from the same regions and work with the same suppliers. This interconnected reality makes fragmentation inefficient and, ultimately, ineffective. To address systemic challenges – from climate risk to human rights – there is a clear need to harmonise approaches and align efforts across the industry.
At WJI 2030, we recognise that significant work has already been carried out by many leading organisations. Our role is not to reinvent the wheel, but to build on existing foundations and help translate ambition into action. No company can operate in isolation. Only through collective action across the value chain can we build the trust that underpins long-term credibility.
That credibility depends on genuine multi-stakeholder collaboration, as well as transparency and accountability across all business functions. It requires new types of partnerships – bringing together industry, suppliers, civil society, academia, and international organisations – under a shared framework. This also calls for a different leadership mindset: one rooted in humility, openness, and a willingness to co-create rather than compete for ownership.
True systemic change can only happen if the entire value chain is aligned. Suppliers – many of which are SMEs and family-run businesses – are not peripheral actors; they are the backbone of the industry. Building long-term, trust-based relationships with them is critical, as is supporting them in operationalising compliance, strengthening management systems, and navigating the sustainability transition.
The case for working with SMEs is now backed by hard numbers. According to the World Economic Forum’s Sustainability Meets Growth: A Roadmap for SMEs and Mid-Sized Manufacturers (June 2025), SMEs represent 90% of businesses globally and account for 40–60% of business-sector greenhouse gas emissions, yet they remain one of the most under-supported segments in the global sustainability transition. The same WEF survey finds that 68% of industrial SMEs view sustainability positively and 38% already see it as a business opportunity. The willingness is there; the support system is what is missing.
The International Trade Centre, the joint agency of the WTO and the UN, similarly found in its 2025 white paper that firms taking climate adaptation or mitigation measures are nearly 20 percentage points more likely to innovate in product or process. At the Global SME Ministerial in July 2025, ITC reported that 80% of small businesses investing in climate measures had unlocked new market opportunities. For SMEs, sustainability is no longer a cost – it is a competitiveness lever.
How WJI 2030 is putting this into practice
At WJI 2030, collaboration is translated into practice through a structured approach:
• Building tools in partnership with experts, leading organisations aligned with evolving policies and regulations
• Testing them with companies and suppliers in real conditions to continuously improve them, to stay relevant and add value to the business
• Where we see the biggest opportunity is scaling our work with the wider industry to accelerate impact across the value chain.
This is reflected in concrete initiatives such as:
• The Nature Roadmap, developed through multi-stakeholder consultation including World Wildlife Fund, International Union For Conservation Of Nature, WBCSD – World Business Council for Sustainable Development, World Economic Forum, Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD)
• The WEPs Transparency & Accountability Roadmap, developed through an extensive stakeholder consultation, and have engaged with stakeholders across the watch and jewellery, food and beverage, banking, and energy sectors.
• The Solutions Lab for SMEs, developed with the UN Global Compact, providing accessible and open source e-learning modules
Through these efforts, we aim to create practical, scalable solutions that support the entire industry – especially SMEs – in building capacity, understanding regulatory requirements, and embedding sustainability across operations.
Ultimately, collaborative approaches are becoming essential because the challenges we face are systemic, interconnected, and global. Addressing them requires collective intelligence, shared responsibility, and coordinated action. Only by working together can we move from ambition to execution – and from responsibility to resilience.
Your career has spanned responsible sourcing, public affairs, luxury, sustainability and international policy. What experiences most shaped your approach to leadership and long-term industry transformation?
My leadership approach has been shaped by one constant: start with people, guided by a clear north star – integrity.
I began in technology, in human resources and talent acquisition, where I learned that transformation starts with understanding people – their motivations and well-being. Change only succeeds when people are part of the journey.
Moving into the diamond and jewellery industry deepened this perspective. Working across Africa, India, China, and Southeast Asia, I saw firsthand how responsible practices drive both business performance and human impact. It was at supply chain level that I understood how standards, systems, and culture must align to deliver real change. I was sitting at the table when the Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC) was founded in 2005 and I was one of the first to test the standards across different regions in the world.
A pivotal shift came through public affairs and serving as Chair of the UN Global Compact Belgium, where my lens expanded from company action to system transformation. I learned that leadership is not about authority, but about convening, aligning, and building trust across diverse stakeholders. It also taught me how deeply interconnected industries are – and how essential it is to adopt a landscape approach, as we often operate and invest in the same regions. In this context, collaboration is not optional; it is key to driving meaningful and lasting impact.
Today, at WJI 2030, this translates into mobilising collective action on topics that are key to business resilience. Leadership is no longer about individual performance – it is about creating the conditions for collaboration, transparency, and shared progress across an entire ecosystem.
One of the most remarkable aspects of WJI 2030 has been your ability to help bring together some of the most influential names in global luxury around a shared long-term vision for the industry. How did the original idea for the initiative first emerge, what inspired you personally to help build it, and how did you succeed in creating early alignment around such an ambitious platform?
A genuine story of collaboration
Kering and Cartier, delegated by Richemont, the co-founders of WJI 2030, truly understood what was at stake. When WJI 2030 was founded in 2022 at Watches & Wonders, there was a clear and shared understanding that climate, nature and inclusiveness risks are no longer peripheral issues – they are core to a resilient business model. Addressing these material topics requires collective action on the ground, across the value chain.
Industry frontrunners – including Cartier, Chanel and Kering – chose to join forces to advance the sector through collective action, fostering a multi-stakeholder ecosystem of shared learnings and solutions aligned with evolving policies and regulations, with one common objective: to drive meaningful action across companies.
With humility, in just three and a half years, WJI 2030 has grown into a global community of 90 members, including many leading brands such as Boucheron, Chanel, Gucci, Messika, Pomellato and Prada, among others. What I am most proud of, however, is the strong engagement of suppliers and smaller brands. Building bridges across the industry is essential to ensure we move forward together, as one. But allow me also to applaud the work of many other leading organisations, as there is so much work to do.
Why this ecosystem holds together
All these stakeholders contribute to a wider ecosystem that focuses on protecting the integrity of the watch and jewellery industry. More and more, there is a shared recognition that systemic challenges – climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and human rights due diligence – cannot be addressed by individual actors alone. They require coordinated, collective action across the value chain.
It requires more than ever for many organisations to work together and support one another to advance the industry as a collective. Our partnership with ESG Book is a strong example of this approach, while our collaboration with CIBJO and UFBJOP has been instrumental in aligning efforts and strengthening industry-wide impact.
Supply chain transparency, climate resilience, human rights, circularity and inclusiveness are becoming increasingly interconnected challenges for the sector. Looking ahead, what kind of transformation would you most hope to see across the global watch and jewellery industry over the next decade?
Stronger collaboration across the ecosystem
We have developed many solutions that work towards the operationalisation of legislation and policies, focused on building business resilience and strengthening capabilities across the value chain. However, we strongly believe in the need for collective action within the industry and across industries, to learn from one another, bridge gaps, and scale solutions to ensure alignment, consistency, and greater impact.
Credible data
There is already a significant amount of work happening across the industry, and standards, reporting frameworks, and policies are in place. However, as regulations evolve, we need credible and consistent data across the supply chain. The next decade will not be won by adding more frameworks, but by aligning the ones we already have and by bringing the entire value chain – especially SMEs – onto the pathway.
We must focus on where the biggest impacts lie in the supply chain, and for this we need the industry to work collectively on measuring and gathering data points that are consistent, credible, and aligned, enabling us to build trust and deliver more impactful solutions.
That is why our Impact Action Journey Framework, a digital tool designed to guide companies of all sizes in implementing and reporting sustainability actions across the watch and jewellery industry, does not aim to reinvent the wheel, but is built on existing reporting frameworks such as GRI, SASB, EFRAG, and others, and is aligned with regulations including CSRD and CSDDD.
Inclusive leadership
We must recognise how far we still are from achieving gender equality. The latest UN Women Flagship Report, Unfinished Business: Private Sector and Gender Equality (September 2025), highlights persistent gaps: women continue to face a global gender wage gap of around 20% and hold only 30% of managerial roles. Today, just 6% of CEOs worldwide are women, according to Deloitte. Yet there is also a clear business opportunity: women are expected to control around 75% of discretionary spending by 2028, according to BCG.
Accountability is key. Every company has an opportunity to take action. Over the past three years, we have actively worked on activating and accelerating the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) within the industry, building solutions that scale gender-responsive procurement (GRP) across the supply chain, and developing a Transparency & Accountability Roadmap. This roadmap enables companies of all sizes and maturity levels to approach data collection and reporting in a manageable and consistent way.
The Roadmap guides companies from initial visibility to structured accountability, and ultimately to full integration across their operations. It translates complex global standards into a practical and usable framework, supporting companies in navigating an increasingly demanding regulatory and policy landscape, with measurable growth and concrete progress at its core.
Importantly, it has been informed by extensive cross-sector consultations – spanning banking, food and beverage, watch and jewellery, fashion, and leading data rating agencies – enabling companies to measure, manage, and disclose their gender equality impacts across governance and leadership, workplace, marketplace, and community.
Looking ahead, we must commit to a new era of industry-wide collaboration – one driven by courageous leadership, exceptional craftsmanship, and continuous innovation. This requires a deliberate and genuine alignment of efforts at scale, recognising the magnitude of the work ahead of us.
As an industry, we share a singular objective: to deliver exceptional jewellery grounded in trust, integrity, and excellence. Achieving this will demand not only ambition, but also shared accountability, discipline, and a steadfast commitment to collective progress.
