Aromar Revi is the founding Director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. He is a global practice and thought leader, and educator with over 37 years of interdisciplinary experience in sustainable development, global environmental change, long-term futures, governance, public policy and finance, and urbanisation. Aromar is a global expert on Sustainable Development; Co-Chair of UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN). He is a member of the Advisory Board of UCLG the global voice of local and regional governments from 0.24 million towns, cities and regions.

Aromar is a leading expert on global environmental change, especially climate change. He was a Coordinating Lead Author (CLA) of the 2018 IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C. He is a CLA of the synthesis chapter on Climate Resilient Development Pathways of the IPCC AR 6 on Adaptation, and a member of the AR6 Synthesis Report Core Writing Team. He was also a CLA of the 2018 SR1.5 Summary for Urban Policymakers, and the 2021 Summary for Financial Decision Makers. He was earlier a CLA of the IPCC Assessment Report 5 on Urban Areas, that established the role of cities and regions in addressing climate risks in 2014.

He is one of South Asia’s most experienced risk and disaster management professionals and has been a member of the Advisory Board of UNDRR' Scientific & Technical Advisory Group and its bi-annual Global Assessment of Risk, from 2008. He has led the design for UNDRR of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure - a global partnership to promote the resilience of infrastructure systems to climate and disaster risks.

As Dean – School of Environment and Sustainability (SES) at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Jagdish leads the build-out of the School, providing the strategic direction and operational guidance needed to expand its academic footprint, research activities and network, practice portfolio, and capacity-building initiatives. Jagdish will also help develop the IIHS Kengeri campus and its environs as India’s first Urban Ecological Observatory and strengthen IIHS’s profile in Ecology and Conservation Science.

He is a field ecohydrologist and a landscape ecologist with research and teaching interests in applied statistics, environmental applications of remote sensing and GIS, ecosystem services, ecological restoration, river ecology and climate change. He loves the challenge of understanding complex changes in the environment over time and space. He was the Coordinating Lead Author of the Special IPCC Report on Climate Change and Land.

Jagdish was at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bengaluru where he was a faculty member for over 20 years. He has been a faculty member at the Wildlife Institute of India and has also been an affiliate teaching faculty at the National Centre for Biological Sciences-TIFR (NCBS-TIFR), Bengaluru where he has been involved with the Masters Programme in Wildlife Biology and Conservation since its inception.

Seth Schultz is the CEO of Resilience Rising. He has a long track record of building consensus and initiating change in the field of sustainable development, and of raising international awareness on the role of cities in tackling climate change. He is a passionate advocate for a safe, resilient and sustainable future and the role that post-Covid-19 economic stimulus packages can play in contributing to long term resilience.

With over 20 years of experience, Seth has worked with leading and innovative organisations in this space including the Louis Berger Group, the US Green Building Council, the Clinton Foundation, C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, the Global Covenant of Mayors, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where he was Co-Chair of the Scientific Steering Committee for Cities IPCC and served as a lead author on the ground-breaking IPCC Special Report on 1.5 Degrees.

Dr. Timon McPhearson is Professor of Urban Ecology, Director of the Urban Systems Lab, and Research Faculty at the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School. He is a Senior Research Fellow at The Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, and a Research Affiliate of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. He studies the ecology in, of, and for cities to advance resilience, sustainability, and justice. In 2017 he was awarded the Distinguished University Teaching Award at The New School. In 2019 he was awarded both the Sustainability Science Award and the Innovation in Sustainability Science Award by the Ecological Society of America. In 2020 he was named an NYC Climate Hero by the NYC DOT and Human Impacts Institute and appointed by the NYC Mayor to the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC). He has published over 100 articles, books, book chapters, and scholarly articles including in scientific journals (Nature, Nature Climate Change, Nature Sustainability, BioScience), books (e.g. Resilient Urban Futures, Urban Planet), and popular press (The Nature of Cities, Resilience Quarterly), and is widely covered in the press (e.g. The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, New York Times Magazine, CityLab, Urban Omnibus). He is a founding editor of Nature npj Urban Sustainability.