Wes Fisher has over 30 years’ experience as an IA practitioner and capacity development professional in less-developed countries, including time living in Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Botswana and Lesotho. He was also a Principal with the Cadmus Group, an environmental consulting firm in Massachusetts. He joined the International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA) in 2002. He received IAIA’s Outstanding Service Award in 2014 and 2022 and served as Co-chair of the Climate Change Section for over 10 years. He was a key organizer of two IAIA Climate Change symposia at the World Bank, and in Aalborg, Denmark in 2010 and instrumental in the development of IAIA’s Climate Change Action Plan. He is currently co-coordinator of a group of IAIA members promoting Earth and Human Systems impact assessment and mitigation/restoration planning. His career has focused heavily on EIA capacity development for NGO’s and development institutions (e.g., as trainer/facilitator for 28 courses in 21 countries since 1995). He holds a Master of Science in geology and Bachelor’s in biology from Stanford University.

Prof. Dong Zhanfeng is currently working at the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning (CAEP) directly under the Ministry of Environment and Ecology (MEE), acted as the director of the Environmental Management and Policy Institute(EMPI).He is mainly engaged in resources and environmental management, environmental economics and policy. He acted as the council or committee membership of the international and domestic academic groups, like the chairman of the Chinese Society of Environmental Economic. He has presided over more than 40 national science and technology projects and presided over more than 10 international cooperation projects funded by UNEP, ADB etc. He won the first prize of national environmental protection science and Technology Award. He is the key expert in 30 national eco-environmental planning and legislative policies. He has published more than 100 academic papers in important academic journals at home and abroad, published more than 10 books.

Michael Spencer is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at Green Lab, an impact lab of the Monash Business School in Melbourne, where he works on ways to accelerate implantation of climate adaptation. Michael has taught sustainability for business, geopolitics and business globalisation and, international institutions. He spent 20 years establishing or working with multi-stakeholder social and environmental standard-setting and labelling organisations. He was part of a small group that formed the global Alliance for Water Stewardship which he chaired for its first decade. Earlier, he worked as part of the global leadership team at the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and established FSC in Australia as its first CEO. Prior to that, he built a distinguished career in business, government and the media; he was the first head of CSR at National Australia Bank, Vice-President Communication at BHP Billiton and senior advisor to the Premier of Victoria. His PhD explored the role of governance in managing human interface with nature.

Dr. Siripha Junlakarn is part of the Energy Policy and Economics Group at Chulalongkorn University’s Energy Research Institute. Her recent work explores solar policy and energy transition, with a focus on the techno-economic issues of distributed generation, especially solar PV. She is also interested in the forces and trends that are advancing energy transformation.

Shreekant Gupta is a scholar and policy expert on economics, environment including climate change and urban affairs. At present he is Visiting Senior Fellow, Centre for Social and Economic Progress, New Delhi and Executive Education Senior Fellow, LKY School of Public Policy at National University of Singapore. Earlier he was Professor at Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, Director, National Institute of Urban Affairs, New Delhi and also worked as an economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank at Washington DC.
Prof. Gupta is an author of the 5th and 6th Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He has a PhD in Economics from the University of Maryland and a Masters from the Delhi School of Economics. He was Fulbright Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Shastri Fellow at Queens University, Canada.

Arati Poudel, originally from Nepal, is a PhD student in the Department of Geography and Resource Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She spent a decade working at the intersection of research and advocacy in roles such as Research Associate at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Senior Research Officer at Digo Bikas Institute, Nepal. Arati is passionate about advancing community-led solutions and has shown this commitment through research, advocacy, community learning exchanges and sharing of case studies in both local and global spaces, including COP26, COP27, andCOP28. With a background in climate science and a strong interest in addressing intersectional climate change issues at the local scale, her research now focuses on how climate extremes, especially too much and too little water, are being addressed in the Ganges Basin of Nepal and India and how communities and civil society are leading these efforts.