Shannon Bouton began her career as a field biologist, serving as an environmental consultant to grassroots nonprofits in the Brazilian Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland. But since 2005, she’s focused her conservation expertise on a much less lush environment: Cities.

“Urban sustainability is the critical infrastructure challenge of this century,” Bouton said. “Because cities are so concentrated, generating 80% of GDP and 70% of greenhouse gas emissions, we have the power to get exponentially impactful results from implementing sustainability practices.”

Bouton is chief operating officer of the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment and a leader of the company’s Sustainability and Resource Productivity Practice, initiatives that grew out of the firm’s history of groundbreaking work to develop data and analysis on issues ranging from examining deficiencies in the global water supply to making supply chains more energy efficient.

Based in Detroit, Bouton has served state and city governments, nonprofits, and public utility clients on energy efficiency strategy and program design, greenhouse gas emissions reduction, and sustainability. She also helped design and launch the firm’s Cities Special Initiative, and led several pilots to help cities choose the right tools to improve economic development, service delivery, and organizational performance.

Bouton’s success stories include working with a large North American city to develop a greenhouse gas cost curve to determine how best to reduce its emissions profile; helping a multilateral organization to create a program that measures the sustainability of cities and then works to enhance their environmental performance; and supporting a state government in building a program to encourage residential and small commercial buildings to implement energy-efficiency measures.

“The goal of our work is the long-term resilience of cities,” Bouton said. “It starts with more efficient, more productive use of natural resources, but over time the result goes well beyond cleaner air and water. Sustainability can actually boost economic growth.”