Environmental Leadership Awards Benefit

ABOUT ROBERTA BARBIERI

Roberta Barbieri is Vice President of Global Sustainability at PepsiCo, where she helps shape and deliver the company’s environmental sustainability strategy. Her work centers on advancing PepsiCo’s net-zero greenhouse gas emissions ambition and its positive water impact strategy—efforts that sit at the intersection of business performance, environmental stewardship, and long-term resilience. With more than 30 years of experience in environmental sustainability across the food and beverage industries, Roberta has spent her career championing the role of global companies as a force for positive environmental change. Before joining PepsiCo, she spent many years at Diageo, serving as Global Environmental Director and helping design and implement the company’s first Global Environmental Sustainability strategy. 

A lifelong environmental advocate, Roberta holds degrees in Environmental Conservation and Environmental Engineering and has a particular passion for restoring native plant ecosystems. She serves on her town’s Conservation Commission, is President of the Board of Directors of the Woodcock Nature Center in Wilton, and is an active member of the Ridgefield Action Committee for the Environment. Outside of her professional and community work, Roberta is an avid hiker and mountain climber, a voracious reader, a mediocre gardener, and a proud mom to two boys and two rescue mutts.

ABOUT ANNE W. SEMMES

Anne W. Semmes is a writer-columnist-editor for over 40 years with features/profiles in national, regional, and local newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Greenwich Time, Greenwich Citizen, and the Greenwich Post newspaper where she served as first editor. She is an ongoing feature writer/columnist/editor for the Greenwich Sentinel newspaper. In 2025 she was presented with an “Award of Excellence in Service to the Earth” by the Sustainability Committee of the Town of Greenwich. She has written and produced for the NBC TV Today Show, A&E History and Biography Television Networks, and Connecticut Public Television, producing a documentary on the Amazonian rainforest of Peru for PBS. She served the Wildlife Conservation Society as a manager. Her magazine writing has included Natural History, Living Bird, E-Environmental Journal, TIME, Greenwich Magazine, Travel World News, and INK. Her new book, Extraordinary Lives of Greenwich, Profiles Over Decades, is soon to be published.

Anne is a native of Memphis, Tennessee, with a lifelong interest in wildlife. She raised her four children in New York City and Greenwich. Her daughter Melissa Groo is a prize-winning wildlife photographer, and was an Audubon Connecticut Lifetime Achievement Awardee in 2017.