Ana Spalding, Director of the Adrienne Arsht Community-Based Resilience Solutions Initiative, Smithsonian
Dr. Ana Spalding is the Founding Director of the Adrienne Arsht Community-Based Resilience Solutions Initiative and Staff Scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI); and affiliated as Associate Professor at Oregon State University. Dr. Spalding has an applied interdisciplinary social science background in economics, marine affairs and policy, and environmental studies; and approximately 20 years of applied experience in international development, conservation, and environmental consulting in Panama and the US. Broadly, her research group studies drivers of global change, impacts of that change on the most vulnerable communities, and what we as a society can do to better respond to those changes and impacts. At STRI, she is advancing interdisciplinary approaches to resilience science and community-based solutions to pressing environmental problems through research, training, and engagement. She has taught several US Ocean Policy courses, and supervised graduate student research related to ocean uses and management across a variety of themes such as marine protected areas (MPAs), offshore renewable energy, fisheries and aquaculture, and adaptation to climate change. Her current research includes locally led conservation, adaptation as a pathway to resilience for marine resource-dependent communities in California and Oregon, and the role of ocean governance tools (e.g., Marine Protected Areas) in achieving just and equitable goals for people and nature. Dr. Spalding is committed to interdisciplinarity and collaboration as a critical framework for co-creating innovative and just solutions to coupled social-environmental crises facing our oceans.
The Rt Hon Patricia Scotland KC
Secretary-General of The Commonwealth
Patricia Scotland was born in the Commonwealth of Dominica. She is the tenth of twelve children and grew up in London. She completed her LLB (Hons) London University at the age of twenty and was called to the Bar at Middle Temple at the age of twenty-one.
Her career has been marked by achieving a number of extraordinary firsts, not least of which was to be the first woman in the more than 700-year history of the office to serve as Her Majesty’s Attorney-General for England and Wales and for Northern Ireland.
While holding these and other senior ministerial office she was given responsibility, inter alia, for gender equality, domestic violence, forced marriage, and international child abduction, and from these positions promoted diversity and equality of opportunity, particularly for women and girls.
Bosco Juma, Director of Kenya Big Ship
Bosco Juma is the Executive Director of Big Ship CBO. He has 15 years experience working with Youths and advocating for Rights to Clean and Healthy environment. Bosco Juma is a marine conservationist focusing on peri-urban mangrove forest conservation in Kenya.
Through rehabilitation of degraded mangrove forest and community development he has restored and conserved mangrove while empowering communities. The integration of mangrove planting with its value chain nodes like bee keeping, ecotourism, carbon trading creates NBS 101.
“What is important about my work/initiative of nature based solutions to mitigate climate change is that Adopt a site apply Periodic monitoring using GIS and integrates restoration and sustainable development livelihoods projects.”
Coral Pasisi, Director of Climate Change and Sustainability at The Pacific Community
Coral Pasisi is the Director of the Sustainable Pacific Consultancy and President of Tofia Niue, a Non Profit Organisation focused on Ocean Sustainable Management, and is a member of the Climate Security Expert Network. She was the Regional Advisor on the Pacific to the Green Climate Fund, from 2015 to September 2019. Prior to that, she worked with the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, primarily as itsRegional and International Issues Adviser and Acting Director of Strategic Partnerships from 2007-2014.
Peerzadi Rumana Hossain, Climate Change Research Scientist, WorldFish/CGIAR
Dr. Peerzadi Rumana Hossain is a Climate Change Research Scientist with WorldFish, Bangladesh and South-Asia Office. She is leading the project “Capacitating farmers and fishers to manage climate risks in South Asia” that focuses on climate information and advisory services for fishers and farmers in Bangladesh and India. She holds a PhD in Environmental Sciences emphasizing climate change impacts and adaptation pathways, and MSc in Forestry. She has ten years of professional experiences in multi-disciplinary research environment from the ecological, social and economic dimensions of ecosystem based natural resource management. She worked at USDA (Chittagong) during 2008-2009, at BCAS (Dhaka) during 2010-2012 and at INTEGRA LLC (Washington DC) in 2016 on a wide range of projects which were also focused on climate change, climate change induced impacts and climate resilient environmental systems. She loves to explore the potentials of nature to improve the quality of life on Earth.
Josheena Naggea, André Hoffmann Ocean Innovation Fellow , Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions and World Economic Forum
Dr. Josheena Naggea is a Mauritian interdisciplinary researcher and postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions and the World Economic Forum. Her research contributes to the science-policy-business nexus, with a focus on centering equity in ocean innovations to benefit coastal communities. She holds a Ph.D. in Environment and Resources from Stanford University.
She spent her early academic career conducting community-engaged research focused on climate change adaptation, disaster impacts and recovery, marine protected area management, and the inclusion of natural and cultural heritage in marine governance.
Josheena has taken on several service-oriented roles: as a founding member of the Africa-Europe Strategy Group on Ocean Governance and the Blue Economy; as an early career professional liaison for the Sustainable Blue Food Futures for People and Planet Program to the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development; as an Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Fellow on the Transformative Change Assessment; and as a national steering committee member for the Global Environment Facility Small Grants Programme, in Mauritius, where she continues to support community-led efforts for sustainability, biodiversity conservation, and poverty alleviation.
Alfredo Giron, Acting Head of Ocean, World Economic Forum
Alfredo is Head of the World Economic Forum’s Ocean Action Agenda and Friends of Ocean Action, leading strategy across a wide range of ocean work. The Ocean Action Agenda work aims to create business and policy transformations for a sustainable ocean. He has wide experience spearheading the creation of public-private partnerships to address pressing ocean challenges related to marine conservation and restoration, sustainable fisheries management, and accelerating the blue economy. His work has contributed to strengthening the role of science in marine policy in over 15 countries. Before joining the Forum, Alfredo was an André Hoffmann fellow at the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions and the World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), where he led the creation of scientific and technological solutions to combat illegal fishing. He holds a PhD and MSc from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a Bachelor in Science from the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California. He was selected as the Roger Revelle awardee by the US National Academy of Sciences in 2021 for his contributions to global ocean policy.
Ellen R. Stofan, Under Secretary for Science and Research, Smithsonian
Dr. Ellen Stofan oversees the science museums and science research centers as well as the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, Office of International Relations, Smithsonian Scholarly Press and Scientific Diving Program. Stofan previously was the John and Adrienne Mars Director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
As the former Chief Scientist of NASA, Stofan served as the principal advisor to the Administrator on science programs and strategic planning. Stofan held senior scientist positions at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Currently, she is on the science team of the NASA Dragonfly mission to Titan. Stofan holds master’s and doctorate degrees in geological sciences from Brown University, and a bachelor’s degree from the College of William & Mary.
At COP28, U/S Stofan will lead the Smithsonian delegation and meet with partners and bilateral/multilateral agencies to advance the Smithsonian’s Life on a Sustainable Planet strategy which aims to implement holistic and multi-scale approaches to environmental conservation and climate change, working in concert with communities around the world and advancing science-based solutions that benefit people and nature.