After working for 10 years in rural development and environmental issues based in Europe, Santiago relocated to Southern Africa, where he worked for the International Aid Agency of Spain, mainly in land reform processes.  Santiago has worked internationally in West and Southern Africa and the Middle East.  He received a master’s degree in international agriculture from Cornell University while working at the Cornell Institute for African Development, a master’s degree in environmental auditing from the EU, and a bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering from the University of La Rioja (Spain).  From 2016 to 2017, Santiago was the senior director of international development at CARE Canada.  He is currently director of climate-resilient food systems at IDRC.

Gary Bull is head of the Department of Forest Resources Management at the University of British Columbia. Internationally, he has worked with Climate and Land Use Alliance, the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome, the Sustainable Biomass Partnership, and the US Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. He has supervised research projects with CIFOR, World Bank, Shell Canada, Wildlife Conservation Society, WWF, Iisaak Forest Resources Ltd., Forest Trends and FAO.

Gary has a background in commerce as well as three degrees in Forestry specializing in economics and policy. He has an interest in global forestry policy issues and has studied forest and timber markets in Asia and ecosystem services markets in Afghanistan, Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Uganda.

Mafa Chipeta is a former FAO subregional coordinator for Eastern Africa and FAO representative to Ethiopia, the African Union and the UN Economic Commission for Africa.  He has also worked at FAO Rome headquarters as director of policy assistance for all aspects of agriculture and food security, coordinating nine policy offices worldwide, and was first FAO focal point for the New Partnership for African's Development (NEPAD), for which he synthesized the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme adopted by the African Union.

From 1999 to 2001, Mafa was deputy director-general of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Indonesia.  He has acted as FAO representative in Uganda, as an FAO senior forestry officer and acting head of planning and statistics, and was the UN system forestry focal point for followup to the Rio Earth Summit.  He has also worked as a professional forester and forest industries expert for FAO.

James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, has authored dozens of peer-reviewed scientific papers on climate science. After nearly a half century of research in planetary and climate science for NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) – including landmark testimony to the US Congress in 1988 urging acknowledgment of human-caused global warming – Dr. Hansen now leads the Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions program at the Columbia University Earth Institute. His pioneering research has shaped much of our current understanding of human-caused climate change.

Dr. Hansen is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and the author of the critically acclaimed Storms of My Grandchildren.

Steven Higgins is a plant ecologist and professor of botany at the University of Otago, New Zealand, whose research looks at the processes that influence the distribution and dynamics of plant species and vegetation. His work includes a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change that documents widespread and substantial change in global patterns of vegetation activity over recent decades, changes likely to have significant impact on ecosystem stability, carbon and energy exchange between land surface and the atmosphere and agricultural practices.

Dr. Higgins has a long history of research in savanna ecosystem dynamics and carbon sequestration, including field work in Kruger Park, RSA. Since moving to New Zealand, he has been setting up research projects related to the evolution of species and functional diversity. His work on savannas has been motivated by a curiosity to understand the conditions under which grasses and trees coexist, but applications of this research include defining principles for the sustainable management of extensive rangelands and how savannas, grasslands and forests respond to elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide. Steve’s research areas include biogeography, conservation biology and ecological economics.

Pushker Kharecha is deputy director of the Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Program at the Columbia University Earth Institute. His research focuses on the human dimensions of the global carbon cycle, including mitigation of the impacts of fossil fuel burning and land use. He is particularly interested in analyzing empirical data on energy and land use and developing climate change mitigation scenarios. Dr. Kharecha has lead/co-authored multiple high-profile scientific papers and has served as a lead author on a major UNEP publication (Global Environment Outlook-5). He has served as a co-lead author at the United Nations Environment Programme and has led and co-authored high-impact peer-reviewed scientific papers with Dr. James Hansen.

Dr. Kharecha holds a Ph.D. in geosciences and astrobiology from Penn State University.

Liz Jones is a columnist with the Mail group of newspapers. She worked as a journalist at The Sunday Times Magazine for 11 years, where she launched Sunday Times Style.  In 1998, she became editor-in-chief of UK Marie Claire, where she published many stories about animal cruelty, including ground-breaking journalism on the training of elephants and the cruelty of horse racing. She has also worked as Chief Interviewer at the London Evening Standard.

In 2015, she travelled with to Kerala to report on the suffering of temple elephants. She was named Columnist of the Year at the prestigious Press Awards in July 2021.

Author of Comfortably Unaware: Global Depletion and Food Choice Responsibility, Richard Oppenlander is a sustainability consultant and researcher who has studied the relationships between global resource depletion, choices of food and how current demands for animals and fish have become a dominant influence on earth’s ecological webs. Dr. Oppenlander has been a keynote speaker at universities, colleges and corporations on food choice responsibility and how our livestock-fishing vacuum is directly tied to poverty, the erosion of life-sustaining resources, and critical losses of biodiversity. His most recent book, Food Choice and Sustainability, is described as an impeccably documented and vital wakeup call.

Charlie Shackleton is an interdisciplinary scientist and professor and DST/NRF research chair in the Department of Environmental Science, Rhodes University, South Africa. He has published widely on issues relating to rural livelihoods in Southern Africa, particularly in relation to the use of and trade in wild natural resources and the ecology and sustainable use of resources.  He has applied similar concepts and methods to examine the supply and demand for wild natural resources in urban settings. He guides postgraduate students in several Southern and West African countries and collaborates in research projects and networks internationally.

Dr. Shackleton holds a Ph.D. from the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa).

Gordon has created and managed competitiveness-enhancing economic, enterprise and agricultural initiatives in 32 countries and 60 US cities, including former socialist and disaster/conflict-disrupted economies.  He has advised and positioned governments, small and medium agricultural enterprises and communities on country, market and area competitiveness.

Gordon is skilled in reducing blockages to advances in agro-enterprise and in identifying and exploiting wealth creation gaps.  His achievements include the building of agricultural opportunities across Iraq; building of a portfolio of more than 75 enterprise and agriculture opportunities across Aceh exploiting gaps in supply and value chains to advance tens of thousands of Acehnese; organizing and leading the largest business-agricultural development, investment-attraction and advocacy mission to a foreign country in Guyana’s history; and development of US Treasury initiatives that moved $6 billion into financial institutions serving poor areas for economic development in US inner cities.

Paul Turner is a former chair of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University and a faculty member in the Graduate Program in Microbiology at Yale University School of Medicine.  At Yale, Dr. Turner has served as director of graduate studies in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and on the Graduate School Executive Committee, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Undergraduate Program Steering Committee, and the university Budget Committee.  He has also been a visiting scholar at University of California San Diego, and Visiting Faculty Fellow in the Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular Biology and Evolution at Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA.

Dr. Turner is involved in worldwide research and training programs in the rapidly growing field of evolutionary medicine, virus ecology and evolution, host parasite interactions and the evolution of infectious disease.  The evolutionary approach has driven important advances in our understanding of the increasing spectrum of autoimmune disease and infectious triggers in diseases like HIV/AIDS and diseases caused by other RNA viruses, including Ebola hemorrhagic fever, SARS, West Nile fever, polio and measles.