Director of  Corporate Environmental Affairs

Royal Bank of Canada (RBC)

Sandra Odendahl is Director of Corporate Environmental Affairs at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), where she leads a team with responsibility for global strategy and leadership in the areas of environmental credit risk management, environmental products and services, and corporate environmental programs across the bank.  Her unit is also responsible for RBC’s stakeholder engagement activities on environmental issues.

Sandra’s education and professional experience blends science, technology and finance to solve thorny environmental problems and act on opportunities for business to benefit from environmental sustainability.  Prior to entering the banking sector, RBC, Sandra was a research scientist with Noranda Inc. in Montreal, and then an environmental consultant in Toronto and Vancouver, specializing in Environmental Impact Assessments for resource sector development projects in Canada and Indonesia.

Sandra joined RBC in 1997 as a resource sector analyst, and then from March 2000 to August 2005 she was the head of RBC’s Environmental Risk Management department.    Sandra left RBC in September 2005 for 2 years at CIBC, where she was Director of their Corporate Environmental program, before returning to RBC in September 2007 to take the newly created position of Director of Corporate Environmental Affairs. 

Sandra has been a member of the Advisory Board of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto since 2005.  From 2005 to 2009, Sandra chaired the North American Task Force of the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI).  She was formerly the Co-Chair of the Conference Board’s Business Council on Sustainability and was a member of the Commodities Research Advisory Panel for the Conference Board’s “Canada Project”.   In May 2010, Sandra was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Toronto Atmospheric Fund. 

Born in Ottawa, Sandra has a B.A.Sc in Chemical Engineering from the University of Ottawa, and an M.A.Sc. in the same field from University of Toronto.  Sandra has been a licensed professional engineer since 1994, and she earned her CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) charter in 2007.   She lives with her husband and two children in Toronto.