Who we are
Mantle Developments provides consulting services to leading climate-smart construction projects. Many of our projects target net-zero carbon. We help the project team think beyond energy efficiency to also manage the carbon impact of the entire life cycle of the project from construction material manufacture to ultimate end-of-life and reuse. We also help our projects to be resilient to the changing climate.
Mantle Developments began in 2015 as a division of the interdisciplinary climate strategy consultancy Manifest Climate (previously named Mantle314). Mantle Developments was spun-out in 2021 to focus on climate-smart buildings and infrastructure.
Our team of climate experts are based in Toronto and Vancouver. We bridge the gap between climate innovation and real-world decision making for the built environment.
Team
Ryan Zizzo 
Founder & CEO // Toronto
PEng, MASc, LEED AP ND
Low-carbon infrastructure and construction
Ryan is a professional engineer with over 15 years of climate-smart construction project management experience across Canada and Europe. He creates and implements sustainability strategies that help clients understand, track and reduce their environmental impacts and exposure to climate change risk. Focus areas include net-zero strategies, green building certifications, embodied carbon life cycle assessment, and climate resiliency. He currently teaches a graduate course in low-carbon construction materials and life cycle assessment at Toronto Metropolitan University's Faculty of Engineering & Architectural Science. Ryan's work has directly supported an update to the Toronto Green Standard v4, North America's first policy to limit embodied carbon on certain types of new building construction. He has also contributed to the development of the Government of Canada's Standard on Embodied Carbon in Construction.
His past experience includes managing and certifying LEED green building projects across Canada, lecturing graduate courses on life cycle assessment at Finland’s largest Technical University, and providing green building education seminars throughout Europe.
Ryan was recognized with a Canada Clean50 2024 award for his contribution to low-carbon construction and policy.
Kathleen Kauth 
Chief Operating Officer // Toronto
Olympian & Clean Tech Executive
Clean technology and low carbon operations & business development
Kathleen is a business development and operations professional with nearly 15 years of experience in driving clean technology products and projects to market. She supports the Mantle team by enabling it to maximize its impact in the climate transition through operations, strategy, business development, and team management.
Irene Lam 
Senior Advisor // Toronto
Irene is a cleantech and climate professional with skills in program design and management, strategy, partnerships, and facilitation. She is experienced in leading diverse multi-stakeholder initiatives to address complex problems.
Prior to Mantle Developments, she spent nearly ten years supporting cleantech innovators across start-ups, corporate and government organizations to address barriers to innovation adoption to accelerate and scale their climate impact. Most recently, she oversaw MaRS Discovery District’s climate corporate partnerships, focused on identifying and implementing innovative solutions to achieve net-zero goals. She also managed their flagship climate program, Mission from MaRS – an ambitious technology adoption program that supported 10 of Canada’s highest potential carbon-reducing solutions.
Marco A. Rico Thirion
Senior Advisor // Toronto
P. Eng, MES, MEng,
Climate adaptation & resiliency, embodied carbon, building and neighborhood sustainability
Marco is a professional engineer with over 12 years of consulting experience in the building, industrial, and infrastructure sectors for projects across Canada, the US, and Mexico.
With an undergraduate and master’s degree in civil engineering and a master’s degree in environment and sustainability, his passion resides in developing new decarbonization practices, including deep retrofits with embodied carbon in mind. In addition, he specializes in examining the redevelopment of existing communities using Multi-Objective Optimization design, GIS, census demographics, and simulation tools to support adaptation and resiliency planning.
Marco uses his experience in design, project management, and engineering to develop new methodologies and workflows with a focus on global security and sustainable development. He drives more sustainable, decarbonized, and resilient planning of current and future communities by combining circular economy principles, life-cycle assessment, biomimicry, and regenerative design.
Alanna Komisar
Senior Advisor // Toronto
Alanna is a climate mitigation and adaptation professional with over a decade of experience supporting the building sector’s low-carbon transition. She uses her previous experience in energy efficiency, policy development, carbon utilization, cleantech, and risk mitigation engineering to create novel solutions. She has an undergraduate degree in civil engineering and a masters in mechanical engineering from the University of Toronto.
Mandi Wesley
Advisor // Vancouver
BASc
Embodied carbon, mass timber and high-performance buildings
Mandi focuses on assessing embodied carbon emissions for green infrastructure projects, particularly mass timber and high-performance buildings. She has extensive knowledge of best practices for achieving green building certifications, such as LEED and Passive House. With her background in civil engineering and experience collaborating with multiple stakeholders, Mandi offers a well-versed perspective on data analysis, climate resilient construction and policy advising.
Javaria Ahmad
Advisor // Toronto
Javaria Ahmad has a Bachelor’s in Architecture Design from Pakistan, a postgraduate in green architecture from Algonquin College, and a Masters in Environment and Sustainability (MES) from Western University. She has seven years of experience in research, analysis, consulting, and building design.
Javaria previously worked as an analyst consulting on federal and city-level climate action policy for material embodied carbon in residential construction with projects in Ontario and BC. She has led sustainability initiatives, developing and implementing corporate sustainability policies. She studied urban and building-scaled carbon emissions throughout her post-graduate education. Javaria is an accredited LEED Green Associate with proven knowledge of policy consulting, building design, and embodied carbon analysis.
Michael Chen
Advisor // Toronto
MGA, BA
Climate reporting and disclosure, sustainable finance, and environmental policy
Michael assists financial institutions in their decarbonization journey. He supports clients through developing science-based emissions targets using SBTi target-setting tools and other net-zero frameworks and navigating the voluntary carbon offset market. With a background in international relations, smart cities, and sustainable finance, he provides a strong understanding of global trends in sustainability for companies looking to align and take advantage of emerging climate-related themes in finance.
Adam Parker
Advisor // Toronto
Life-cycle assessment, sustainable buildings, electrification
Adam is an advisor in the area of whole building life-cycle assessment and environmental certification. Bringing a broad spectrum of technical abilities to Mantle, Adam is able to tackle difficult sustainability issues using the latest computational tools.
As a master’s student studying Civil Engineering at the University of Toronto, Adam worked to tease out the complex impact of vehicle electrification on grid emissions. His work utilized Python-based power systems models to generate large amounts of hourly generation data for analysis. Adam presented his work at the 2022 ISSST (International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technology) Conference in Pittsburgh and is currently preparing his work for publication in an academic journal.
Eslam Elshorbagy
Advisor // Ottawa, ON
MASc, PMP, LEED Green Associate
Net zero-life cycle construction management.
Eslam Elshorbagy works at the interface of engineering and policy to achieve net-zero buildings and infrastructure. He is the founder of the Carbon Leadership Forum Ottawa Hub. he worked as a research and teaching assistant at the department of Civil Engineering at the University of Ottawa. His research focused on applying a life cycle thinking approach to provide evidence for decision-makers. His projects included urban comparative analysis, campus as a living lab initiative, and building’s integrated renewable energy and energy storage analysis. Eslam holds a Master of Applied Science in Civil Engineering and Policy from the University of Ottawa and a Postgraduate Diploma in Project Management.
We also work closely with team members Manifest Climate, who focus on corporate climate strategy and disclosure