Tanya Steele (Marketing, 1990, Cartmel) is very aware of striking a delicate balance in her role as the UK Head of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) - on the one hand she must draw attention to the way climate change is threatening the world’s most precious places and eco-systems, while on the other she inspires individuals with a hope that they can make a positive difference.

The Lancaster University marketing graduate thinks that stories are key to achieving change: “Ultimately it’s really important for us to inspire and encourage all sectors of society including individual citizens on the journey. If people feel powerless then policies and businesses are not going to change.”

Her work - which can see her talking to members of the UK’s Climate Change Committee or the UN one day, and meeting members of indigenous communities from the Amazon on another - brings her stories daily, to back up the science and policy that governments and banks require.

Based in London, she’s been to the Amazon a number of times. “The thing about standing in the Amazon jungle is the sheer scale of it,” she says. “I was lucky enough to visit with a TV crew and it was mind blowing, seeing both the scale and also the Amazon’s vulnerability. You could see both the deforestation and the incursions (such as roads and the expansion of agriculture).”

Closer to home, she has worked with David Attenborough on last year’s BBC Wild Isles series, which was co-produced and supported by WWF and showcased the beauty – but also the fragility – of UK nature. Connected to that, WWF and partners brought together a people’s assembly of members of the British public to produce a People’s Plan for Nature – setting out what our political and business leaders and others need to do to restore the wildlife and wild places we value.

As Tanya says, that process highlighted that all of us can make a difference: “It shows that the decisions and actions of individual people can have an extraordinary impact. I find this talking to business leaders and politicians.” While the challenges facing the natural world are huge, people power will have a huge role to play in solving them.

All this work has brought Tanya a CBE and a Lancaster University alumni award. As well as her engagement work to rally support, she coordinates teams of scientists, policy makers and advocates, and communicators in a bid to combat climate change and restore nature.

She considers it a privilege to be working in such a crucial role, with such breadth. She arrived at Lancaster as an 18 year old from a Macclesfield comprehensive, with a desire to work in social justice, but without any idea how to get there.

Her then boyfriend (now husband) was coming to a northern university, so Lancaster seemed a good choice. He later studied at Lancaster too. She arrived intent on studying marketing, economics and politics, and was attracted by the university’s flexibility and college system

The first person she met on her all-girl corridor in Cartmel College became a friend for life. University was welcoming and fun, and she spent most of her social time hanging out with people from her corridor and friends from her course.

With a friend in her first weeks she set up an enterprise called the Pooh Bear Appreciation Society, which organised pub crawls and socials and made a fortune selling T shirts for Great Ormond Street, and simultaneously filled her bedroom with T-shirts.

It was good practice for her marketing studies: “I loved the relevance of it, she says. “At the time it was so exciting. We did advertising and were thrilled by the fact that principals from London agencies like Saatchi and Saatchi came up.”

By the second year she knew that marketing was what she wanted to do. After graduation she chose to go into the tech side of marketing because she could see that, in that pre-mobile phone era, change was coming which would provide her with important opportunities to make a difference.

She worked in product development, marketing and communications in senior roles for Siemens and BT, which she loved. Then came the day that she picked up her sister Nikki Walsh (a Lancaster University law graduate specialising in human rights) as she returned from a work trip, who asked her: “When are you going to do something useful?”

Tanya describes it as “a punch in the face moment” which prompted her almost immediate decision to take a year out, unpaid, to volunteer with the Red Cross in London, despite colleagues who told her she was throwing her career away. After another short stint with a micro finance company in Kenya, she applied for jobs in the charity sector and landed one at Save the Children, three months before the tsunami in South East Asia in 2004, which she describes as “one the most humbling and defining experiences of my career”.

Now at WWF she says her work is dominated by climate change: ‘We don’t really have a choice, but we do have the opportunity to restore our planet to make sure it is in much stronger shape for our children.”

It’s a demanding job, using many skills she is grateful to have developed at Lancaster:: “It taught me how to think, not just to learn. I was really shy and it gave me confidence. The nature of the course I was on I had to present to 200 people and in doing so it forced me into a setting that I would not have experienced in an academic environment. It also gave me a sense of community. If you do not have those foundations you cannot do the tough stuff. It gives you resilience.”