Dymphna van der Lans is Chief Executive Officer of the Clean Cooking Alliance (CCA), which works to accelerate universal access to clean cooking by partnering with governments and industry to strengthen markets and develop enabling policy and regulatory frameworks. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), more than 2 billion people lack access to clean cooking, and the problem is most acute in Africa, where four in five households still lack access.

Van der Lans brings more than 25 years of experience managing and leading global development, energy and climate initiatives in the non-profit and private sectors. She spent seven years at BP, where her last appointment was director of distributed energy markets at BP Alternative Energy, and served as director of global renewables, infrastructure and energy efficiency at a specialist investment banking firm in London.

Her non-profit roles have included CEO of the Clinton Climate Initiative at the Clinton Foundation and senior director for public policy programmes at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Before joining CCA, she led international corporate engagement for the World Wildlife Fund’s Climate & Energy team. She has led CCA for around eight years, and in July 2026 the Alliance began a new chapter as an intergovernmental initiative with its secretariat hosted by the IEA, with 12 governments represented at its inaugural member meeting.

Under her leadership, CCA’s work spans industry development, carbon market integrity, standards and testing, institutional clean cooking and women’s empowerment, supported by consumer research such as studies of electric cooking in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and a tracker of how national climate commitments address cooking. In 2026 CCA joined the Rockefeller Foundation, the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet and Energy Corps in an effort to scale modern cooking technologies in Africa, from electric, biogas and bioethanol solutions to liquefied petroleum gas and efficient biomass stoves.