Quentin Grafton is the Convenor of the Geneva Actions on Human Water Security. He is a Professor of Economics, Chairholder of the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance and Director of the Centre for Water Economics, Environment and Policy (CWEEP) at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, an Adjunct Professor at the National University of Singapore, Honorary Professor at Lincoln University and President (2017-18) of the Australasian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society.  Quentin currently serves as the Director of the Food, Energy, Environment and Water (FE2W) Network, which he helped found in 2014, as Editor in Chief of Policy Forum.net, which was established in 2014 and as Executive Editor of the Global Water Forum, which he founded in 2010.

Thomas Bolognesi is a senior researcher at the University of Geneva and member of the UNESCO Chairs programme in Hydropolitics. His fields of research include political economy and institutional and organisational economics. The focus of his research falls on water utilities regulation, and the linkages between water security and water governance. He is a series editor of the Palgrave Series in Water Governance.

Amanda Lynch holds the Sloan Lindemann and George Lindemann, Jr. Distinguished Professorship at Brown University, where she is Director of the Brown Institute for Environment and Society. Lynch conducts research on the science and governance of Arctic climate systems, has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, policy briefs, book chapters and books, and developed he first Arctic regional climate system model in 1993. She is ice Chair of the World Climate Research Programme Joint Science Committee, a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.

Prof. Michael Stewardson’s research, over the last 24 years, has focused on interactions between hydrology, geomorphology, and ecology in rivers. This has included physical habitat modelling, flow-ecology science, and innovation in environmental water practice. He has participated in Australia’s water reforms through advisory roles at all levels of government. More recently, his research has focused on the physical, chemical, and biological processes in streambed sediments and their close interactions in regulating stream ecosystem services. He leads the Environmental Hydrology and Water Resources Group in Infrastructure Engineering at The University of Melbourne.

Dr Dustin E. Garrick is a departmental lecturer and research fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford, where he also serves as director of the Smith School Water Programme and convener of the Oxford Water Network. His work focusses at the interface of water and the economy.  He specialises in political economic analysis of water allocation reform and water markets as responses to climate change, urbanisation and sustainable development challenges. His work has included extended field research in Australia, Mexico and the US and been supported by the Australian Research Council, Canadian Research Council, Global Water Partnership, Fulbright Commission, OECD and World Bank. 

Dr Katherine Daniell, BEng(Civil)(Hons)/BA (Adel.), PhD (ANU/AgroParisTech, France), MIEAust, is a Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University in the Fenner School of Environment and Society. Her research focusses on collaborative approaches to policy and action for sustainable development. Katherine is the author of over 80 academic publications including the Cambridge University Press book "Co-engineering and participatory water management: organisational challenges for water governance”. She is a member of the National Committee on Water Engineering (Engineers Australia), member of the Initiatives of the Future of Great Rivers (http://www.initiativesrivers.org/), and editor of the Australasian Journal of Water Resources.

María A. García-Valiñas is Associate Professor (tenured) of the Department of Economics (Oviedo Efficiency Group) at the University of Oviedo (Spain). She is specialized in environmental economics, and in particular, in water economics. She has collaborated with several public and private institutions, such as the Spanish Ministry of Environmental Issues and several River Basin Confederations, analysing urban water demands in some   Spanish regions, in order to implement the economic analysis asked for the EU Water Framework Directive. She has evaluated the use of alternative instruments to manage water demands, such as prices, low-consumption technologies, or education tools. Additionally she has assessed the impact of water pricing on affordability and equity issues at the residential sector.

Dr. Peter Gleick is a leading scientist and communicator on water and climate issues. In 1987 he co-founded the Pacific Institute, which he led as president until mid-2016, when he became president emeritus and chief scientist. Gleick received the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is a recipient of the Ven Te Chow Award from the International Water Resources Association and the United States Water Prize from the US Water Alliance.  Gleick’s work addresses the consequences of climate change for water resources, conflict over water, the “human right to water,” and he pioneered and advanced the concepts of the “soft path for water” and “peak water.”

He serves on the boards of numerous journals and organizations and is the author or co-author of many scientific papers and eleven books, including the series The World’s Water (Island Press, Washington) and A 21st Century U.S. Water Policy (Oxford University Press, New York).  Gleick holds a B.S. from Yale University and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Rob Hope is an Associate Professor and Director of the Water Security Initiative at the School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University, UK. He is a development economist with expertise in water economics, policy and poverty. He is Director of the REACH programme which is a seven year, multi-country science-practitioner partnership to improve water security for five million people in Africa and Asia by 2022 (www.reachwater.org.uk). He is a member of the ESRC’s International Development Expert Group for the UK’s £1.5 billion Global Challenges Research Fund and a member of UNICEF’s Technical Review Group to evaluate global WASH programming from 2006-15.