Alain Bourque holds a BSc in Meteorology from McGill (1989) and a MSc in Atmospheric Science from UQAM (1996). He acted as a meteorologist/climatologist with Environment Canada from 1989 to 2001. He was involved in the analyses of the 1996 Saguenay flooding, the 1998 ice storm and many other activities linked to the impacts and adaptation of extreme weather and climate change. He established and now coordinates the Impacts and Adaptation program of the Ouranos Consortium. Ouranos has been created in 2001 to study the regional climatology and the adaptation to climate change. He is the lead author of the Quebec chapter in the Canadian government’s assessment entitled “From Impacts to Adaptation: Living with Climate Change in Canada 2007”, and was involved in the Quebec chapter of the cross-Canada assessment in 1997. He also contributed to the recent Ouranos publication (2010) “Adapting to Climate Change”. He has been a revisor for the North America chapter of the last IPCC report, working group 2, he is co author of several scientific articles about climate change and he is often asked by the media for doing presentations about the impacts of climate change and how to deal with it.

Dr Anne Brunila is Executive Vice President, Corporate Relations and Strategy for Fortum Corporation. She holds a DSc in Economics and Business Administration from the Helsinki School of Economics and previously served as President of the Finnish Forest Industries Federation, as General Director of the Finnish Ministry of Finance as well as in several advisory and executive positions in the Bank of Finland and the European Commission. Her current key positions of trust include membership of the Board of Sampo plc and Kone Corporation as well as advisory roles for the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy, the Finnish Business and Policy Forum and Aalto University Foundation.

Ian Burton is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Toronto and a Scientist Emeritus with the Climate Research Division in Environment Canada. He was an early contributor to the development of adaptation research and policy, and served as a Lead Author for the IPCC 3rd and 4th Assessments and is now working on the 5th Assessment. He recently served as co-chair of the Advisory Panel on Climate Change Adaptation for the Government of Ontario, and as a consultant to the City of Toronto on climate risk assessment. Ian served as a Convening Lead Author in the recently published IPCC Special Report on Extremes (SREX), and is now co-chair of the Working Group on Forensic Disaster Investigations in the new ICSU International Programme on Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR)  His most recent book is The Earthscan Reader on Adaptation to Climate Change edited with E. Lisa F. Schipper.

Mar Cabeza is a researcher at the Metapopulation Research Group, at the Dept of Biosciences, University of Helsinki. Cabeza obtained her first degree in Spain (University of Barcelona) and her PhD in Finland, at the University of Helsinki. After a three-year postdoc at the Biodiversity and Global Change Lab with Dr. Miguel B. Araújo (CSIC, Spain), Cabeza is now an established PI at the University of Helsinki, leading the “Global Change and Conservation” team. Most of Cabeza’s research is strongly linked to conservation, including theoretical and applied projects both in the developed and developing worlds. Cabeza has participated in a number of international climate change projects, (e.g. “Impacts of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem goods and services in the Barents Region”, a Nordic Council project or MACIS, an EU-FP6 project) and she is currently the leader of the Biodiversity Work Package of the EUFP7 project RESPONSES.

Climate change is affecting conservation areas and is increasing the conservation needs for many species. Also adaptation and mitigation strategies in numerous sectors may affect biodiversity negatively. Understanding and projecting such threats, dealing with uncertainties, and developing approaches to improve conservation planning is currently occupying Cabeza’s research agenda.

Timothy Carter is a Research Professor at the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), Helsinki with over 30 years of research experience in the field of climate change impacts and adaptation. A geographer, he obtained a B.Sc. from the University of London and Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham, UK. He has worked on climate change and agriculture, methods of impact and adaptation assessment, including scenario development, and climate change adaptation. Based in Austria (IIASA), the UK (Birmingham) and since 1990 in Finland, Carter has been a Lead Author for each of the five Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports as well as serving on the IPCC Task Group on Data and Scenario Support for Impacts and Climate Analysis (TGICA) since 1996. He has published 3 books and over 100 refereed papers and reports.

Kristie L. Ebi is a Consulting Professor in the Department of Medicine, Stanford University and the Executive Director of the IPCC WGII Technical Support Unit.  Prior to these positions, she was an independent consultant conducting research on the impacts of and adaptation to climate change, including on extreme events, thermal stress, foodborne safety and security, and vectorborne diseases.  She has worked with WHO, UNDP, USAID, and others on assessing vulnerability and implementing adaptation measures in Central America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.  She facilitated adaptation assessments for the health sector for the states of Maryland and Alaska.  She was a coordinating lead author or lead author in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, and two US national assessments.  Dr. Ebi’s scientific training includes an M.S. in toxicology and a Ph.D. and a Masters of Public Health in epidemiology, and two years of postgraduate research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.  She has edited fours books on aspects of climate change and has more than 100 publications.

Prof. Mikael Hildén is the Director for the Climate Change Programme at the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE). He has a  Ph.D. in Ecology/Resource Management and more than 20 years of experience in environmental management, research, training and consulting both in Finland and abroad. Dr Hildén has managed many projects on environmental policy in Finland and internationally combining legal, economic, social, technical and scientific research on environmental policy, including the use of decision analysis as a framework for dealing with environmental issues. He has lead several multidisciplinary research projects in particular on the evaluation of environmental policy and on environmental assessment of policies, plans and programmes, including the national climate strategies. In recent years his work has been related to innovation studies and the effects of policies on environmentally significant innovations as well as the development of climate policy innovations.

Janne I. Hukkinen (born 1957; PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 1990; MSc, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, 1984) is professor of environmental policy at the University of Helsinki. He studies the cognitive aspects of sustainability assessment and strategy, with empirical applications in participation and expertise in environmental and technology policy. He is a board member of the European Society for Ecological Economics (ESEE) and chair of the Finnish Society for Environmental Social Science (YHYS). Hukkinen is an Expert Counsellor on the Environment for the Supreme Administrative Court of Finland and a member of the European Commission’s 7th FP Environment and Climate Scientific Advisory Group. He was an Academy of Finland senior fellow and visiting scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2006 and an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Environmental Science and Engineering fellow at the US EPA in Washington DC in 1990. He is the winner of the Harold D. Lasswell award for the best article in Policy Sciences in 1990. In addition to over 70 peer-reviewed scientific articles or book chapters, he is the author of Sustainability Networks (2008) and Institutions in Environmental Management (1999), both published by Routledge.

Mr. Kåre Svarre Jakobsen is Head of Division at the Danish Ministry of the Environment, Nature Agency - Division of water, urban environment and climate change adaptation. In his past he worked at the National Association of Local Authorities in Denmark and the municipalities of Greve and Ringsted.

Serving political decision makers at national and local level on climate change adaption is one of his main work areas. This includes e.g. policy development, preparing new legislation as well as a new national action plan on climate change adaption, autumn 2012.

Mr. Kåre Svarre Jakobsen received his Master of Social Science from Roskilde University in 1999 and his Graduate Diploma in Business Administration (Organization and Management) from Copenhagen Business School in 2005".

Carina Keskitalo (E. C. H. Keskitalo) is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Geography and Economic History, Umeå University, Sweden. She has published widely on adaptation to climate change in renewable land use (forestry, reindeer husbandry, fishing and tourism) in northernmost Europe and on the development of adaptation policy in multi-level governance (local to national levels) in European countries.

Richard Klein is a senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and an adjunct professor at the Centre for Climate Science and Policy Research of Linköping University. He is an expert on the science and policy of adaptation to the impacts of climate change, with twenty years of experience in original research, science assessment and policy advice.
 
Much of Richard’s current work addresses the role of adaptation in the design and implementation of a global climate policy agreement, but his work also concerns social and institutional adaptation in Sweden and other European countries. Richard is the founder and editor-in-chief of the academic journal Climate and Development, which first appeared in 2009. He has been an IPCC author since 1994, and co-director and chief scientist of the Nordic Centre of Excellence NORD-STAR since 2011.
 
Before joining SEI in 2006, Richard spent almost eight years at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He began his career at the Institute for Environmental Studies of the VU University in Amsterdam in 1992. To date he has produced over 100 journal articles, book chapters and reports, edited two books and two journal special issues, and contributed to numerous international workshops and conferences.

Sabine McCallum leads the Environmental Impact Assessment & Climate Change Unit at the Environment Agency Austria. She acts as national representative in the EU Adaptation Steering Group as well as the working group on ‘Knowledge Base on Climate Change Impacts, Vulnerability and Adaptation’ and is a board member of the Climate Change Centre Austria. Further, she is leading research projects on national, transnational and EU level with the focus on practical adaptation responses in various fields. Her current consultancy work for the European Parliament and the European Commission has the focus on climate-proofing key EU policies and providing support to the development of the EU adaptation strategy. Within her duties she is also responsible for establishing the Austrian adaptation strategy in support of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management as well as capacity building and awareness raising activities with relevant stakeholders.
Sabine McCallum holds an MSc in Landscape Ecology and Landscape Planning from the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences Vienna, Austria. Her expertise ranges from integrated assessment covering methodological, socio-economic and biophysical dimensions, policy relevant aspects of climate change adaptation, to policy implementation and stakeholder involvement. Her current research interests also include risk and uncertainty, vulnerability assessments, specific support for regional and sectoral adaptation and tailored adaptation options in various fields.

Michael Mullan leads the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) work on climate change adaptation. This encompasses analysis of adaptation policies in OECD countries, integrating adaptation into development assistance and cross-cutting economic issues. Prior to this he was an Economic Advisor for the UK Government, responsible for domestic adaptation policy. He has also worked on a variety of areas related to climate change including: an independent review of finance for reducing emissions from deforestation, mitigation cost curves and agri-environment policy. Michael studied at the University of Oxford and the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Ville Niinistö is the Finnish Minister of the Environment. A native of Turku, he gained a masters degree in Political History from the University of Turku in 2003. Between 2003 and 2005 he was a member of the Green League's Board of Directors and from 2005 to 2007 he served as the party's deputy leader. In October 2004 he was elected to the Turku City Council and appointed as the Green League's representative on the town board. He also chaired the party's group in the regional council. In spring 2007 he was elected to Parliament and in 2009 was elected to chair the Green League's parliamentary group. He was elected for his second term in Parliament in 2011. In the summer of the same year he was also elected as the party leader, and when the Greens entered the Katainen Government he was appointed Minister of the Environment.

Karen O’Brien is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo, Norway.  Her research focuses  on climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptation and the implications for human security, as well as on the relationships between globalization and environmental change. She is particularly interested in the relationship between personal, cultural, organizational and systems transformation, including how transdisciplinary and integral approaches to global change research can contribute to a better understanding of how societies both create and respond to change.  She has participated in the IPCC Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports, as well as the Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX). She has written and edited a number of books, including Environmental Change and Globalization: Double Exposures (Oxford, 2008), Adapting to Climate Change: Thresholds, Values, Governance (Cambridge, 2009) and Climate Change, Ethics, and Human Security (Cambridge, 2010).

Anthony Patt is a Senior Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, where he leads the Decisions and Governance Research Group in the program on Risk, Policy and Vulnerability. Dr. Patt is trained in law and public policy, having received a PhD from Harvard University in 2001. His research has covered several aspects adaptation, and climate policy more generally. Focusing on Africa and Europe, much of this has looked at how people make decisions under conditions of uncertainty, and how expert advisors can best communicate uncertainty in order to assist people in making thoughtful and motivated adaptation choices. It has also included research on the drivers of adaptive capacity, and issues of renewable energy expansion in developing countries. Dr. Patt is currently a Review Editor for the IPCC Working Group II, a lead author for Working Group III, an editorial board member of Global Environmental Change, and a senior editor of Climate & Development and Regional Environmental Change. He lives near Vienna with his wife, Dagmar Schröter, and their two children.

Adriaan Perrels (1958) obtained a M.Sc. in environmental and land use economics at the Free University Amsterdam (VUA) in 1985 and a PhD in economics at the same university in 1992. Most of his work dealt with the economics of energy and transport systems. In 1992 he became researcher in the Netherlands Energy Research Centre (ECN), where he focused on behavioural and residential elements of energy demand (‘lifestyles’) in the context of national, EU and global studies. In April 1998 he started in the Dutch national technical research centre TNO as research coordinator ‘Transport infrastructure and economic development’, built around cost-benefit analysis and performance indicators for transport infrastructure. In September 1999 he moved to Finland and worked 12 years in the Government Institute for Economic Research (VATT) as principal economist. Most projects concerned ex-ante assessment of energy and environmental policies, predominantly climate policy related. Since 2005 adaptation policy made up an increasing share of the study portfolio. As of September 2009, initially part-time and since 2012 full time, Adriaan has the position of Research Professor in the Finnish MeteoroIogical Institute (FMI) with the assignment to build up a research portfolio in (1) economics of climate change impacts and adaptation, and (2) economics of weather and climate services. So far, the emphasis has been on the economic effects of extreme weather conditions in current and future climate in the context of national, EU and global projects. He is (co-)author 150+ publications of which 30 peer reviewed articles and book chapters.

Markku Rummukainen has long experience in climate change research, not least in the development, evaluation and application of regional climate models to climate scenarios. In conjunction to these activities, he has collaborated with climate impact researchers and engaged in research communication. Since 2008, he is the Programme Director of the Swedish strategic environmental research programme Mistra-SWECIA (www.mistra-swecia.se) on interdisciplinary research on climate change adaptation. Markku is Professor in climatology and Deputy Head of the Centre for Environmental and Climate Research at Lund University. At Lund University, he also coordinates the Strategic Research Area MERGE that collects five universities and the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) to develop global and regional climate models into Earth system models that include interactive vegetation and related processes and feedback. He works also as a Climate Advisor at SMHI and provides expert support to the Swedish Government in the UN climate negotiations and contributes to the work of the IPCC. He was earlier the Head of the Rossby Centre, the climate modeling research unit of the SMHI in 1997-2005 and before 1997 did research on stratospheric ozone in Finland and Norway.

Pekka Sauri has served as Deputy Mayor of the City of Helsinki since 2003, in charge of Public Works and Environmental Affairs. He was elected to the office as a Finnish Green League party member by Helsinki City Council, first for a seven-year term, and re-elected for another seven years in 2010. Prior to his current office, Dr Sauri served in various positions in mental health counseling in Finland in 1975–2003. He was Chairman of the Green League of Finland in 1991–93. He also worked as a radio journalist in 1986–2002. Dr Sauri's long list of positions of trust over the past 21 years, both in Finland and internationally include chairmanship of the European Federation of Green Parties in 1994–97. Dr Sauri holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the Brunel University, London, U.K.

Haavard Stensvand  is the Head of Emergency Planning for the County Governor of Sogn og Fjordane, Norway. He has been concerned with issues related to climate change adaptation since he started at the office of the County Governor in 2005. The main part of their practical work on adaptation is related to their role in the spatial planning system.  The County Governor has a guiding and supervising role, which means that, among other topics, they look after how risk and vulnerability assessments have been incorporated in the planning. Guidelines from the Directorate for Civil Protection and Emergency Planning (DSB) emphasize that they must reject spatial plans when risk and vulnerability assessments have not been done, or when found to be insufficient. Assessments are regarded as insufficient if they do not include an analysis of the consequences of climate change. He has also worked on the secretariat of the national committee responsible for preparing the report “Adapting to a changing climate”, and has held lectures on local climate adaptation at the The National Emergency Planning College (NUSB). In the period 2007-2010 he was responsible for the County Governors part of the international adaptation project “Clim-ATIC”.

Paul Watkiss is an independent researcher, a senior associate of the Stockholm Environment Institute, and a Visiting Senior Researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at the Oxford University in the UK.  He is an internationally recognised expert specialising in the economics of climate change and adaptation.  He was the technical director of the EC FP7 ClimateCost research project on the economic costs of climate change in Europe, which included analysis of the costs and benefits of adaptation.

Paul has worked as an advisor to the EEA, the EC, the OECD, the UK Government and the UNFCCC.  He led the 2007 EEA costs of adaptation report and the 2009 UNFCCC SUBSTA technical report on the costs and benefits of adaptation. He recently developed the method for the UK’s National Economics of Climate Resilience Study, a major input to the National Adaptation Programme  His current research interests (on the FP7 Mediation Project) include the use of new decision support tools for assessing the economics of adaptation under uncertainty.

Harry Zilliacus (Finland) is a Senior Adviser at NordForsk, Oslo. Harry is also docent in Physical Geography at the University of Helsinki (PhD 1987). In 1993-2003, he was the secretary of the Nordic Working Group on environmental monitoring and data (NMD) based at the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE). In addition to teaching in Helsinki he was affiliated with Boston University, USA, and Fudan University in Shanghai, PR China, as visiting professor in 1987 and 2002, respectively. His own research he carried out in the Nordic region and in Central Asia. Harry's current responsibilities at NordForsk working for the Nordic Council of Ministers, are mainly as programme secretary for several Nordic Centre of Excellence programmes (Food, nutrition and health; Nordic welfare; Effect studies and adaptation to climate change). He is presently involved in the ongoing Top-level Research Initiative and its NCoE programmes and Nordic network activities (ADAPT, sub-programme 1).   Harry has also contributed to cooperation of Nordic research and researcher education in fields such as the Arctic, Russia and the Baltics, and bibliometrics.