Supporters

Cynthia Rosenzweig is a Senior Research Scientist at The Earth Institute at Columbia University and at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where she heads the Climate Impacts Group and currently, she also serves as an adjunct Professor at Barnard College.

Cynthia was a Coordinating Lead Author of Working Group II for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she joins impact models with climate models to project future outcomes of both land-based and urban systems under altered climate conditions.

Simon Donner is a Professor of Climatology at the University of British Columbia studying how climate and climate change affects society and the environment. His group’s work provides insight into the causes and effects of climate change, public attitudes, policy options and what can be done to adapt.

Simon leads a diverse and cross disciplinary research program at the interface of climate science, marine science, and public policy.

As a scientist, writer, and public speaker, Simon regularly works with community groups, policymakers, and the media to educate about climate change and to help bridge the gap between science and policy.

Brian O’Neill is a Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. He also serves as Director of Research at the Korbel School’s Pardee Center for International Futures.

His research interests are in human-environment interactions, in particular the relationship between future societal development, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change impacts.

Brian has led research groups on Integrated Assessment Modeling and on Climate and Human Systems at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and on Population and Climate Change at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). Brian is a Convening Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s ongoing Sixth Assessment Report.

Yukiko Hirabayashi received the M.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Tokyo in 2001 and 2004, respectively. Before she was assigned to be a Professor of Department of Civil Engineering, Shibaura Institute of Technology, she stayed as Assistant Professor at Yamanashi University in Kofu, Japan and as an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
She is one of the lead authors for the IPCC special report on ocean and cryosphere (SROCC) and the sixth assessment report working group II (AR6 WGII). Her research interests are within the field of global hydrology and world water resources including the impacts of climate change on hydrological extremes and glacier melt as well as the impacts of water-related climate change on human society.

Sonia I. Seneviratne is Full Professor for Land-Climate Dynamics at ETH Zurich since 2016. In her research she analyzes climate extremes, land-climate processes, and climate changes. Prof. Sonia Seneviratne was an author on several reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She was recently a lead author of the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C global warming. Since 2018, she is a coordinating lead author of the 6th assessment report of the IPCC.

Dr. Philip Ward is Professor of Global Water Risk Dynamics at the Institute for Environmental Studies of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His current research focuses on flood and drought risk assessment at the global and continental scale. In the last few years, Philip has developed models to assess these risks today and in the future, as well as methods to assess the effectiveness and feasibility of disaster risk reduction strategies. His research fuses high-level scientific impact with key societal questions, and searches for solutions to global environmental challenges. In 2019, he was awarded the European Geosciences Union Plinius Medal, for his outstanding contribution to natural hazards research.

Dr. Shilong Piao is Cheung Kong Professor of Peking University. His current research focuses on the data-model integration to improve our ability for predicting terrestrial carbon cycle responses to global change. He has authored and co-authored 100 peer-reviewed journal papers, and was lead author of the IPCC 5th assessment report. He is now on the Editorial Advisory board of Global Change Biology and also serves on editorial board of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology.