Pavan Sukhdev is the founder & chair of GIST Advisory Until recently, Pavan was Special Adviser and Head of UNEP’s Green Economy Initiative, which demonstrates that the greening of economies is not a burden on growth but rather a new engine for growing wealth and decent employment, and for the reduction of persistent poverty. A career banker, Pavan took a sabbatical from Deutsche Bank from 2008 till 2010 in order to deliver the environmental projects “TEEB” and the “Green Economy Report” for UNEP’s Green Economy Initiative. Pavan was appointed Study Leader of TEEB in early 2008 by the EU Commission and Germany (the first funders of TEEB) whilst still working full time at Deutsche Bank. TEEB, a global study on “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity” commissioned by the G8+5, released a widely-acclaimed suite of reports at the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity bi-annual meeting (CBD COP-10) at Nagoya, Japan, in October 2010. Until July 2008, Pavan headed Deutsche Bank’s Global Markets businesses in India, including its Fixed Income and Equities divisions and Global Markets Centre, Mumbai (“GMC, Mumbai”). GMC Mumbai, a company he set up in February 2006, is a dedicated global hub for global markets “front-office” off-shoring. It was a market first of its kind, and is a leader in front-office offshoring of capital markets trading and sales business. From 2006 to 2008, he led the build-out of Deutsche Bank’s Global Markets presence in India into a veritable powerhouse, spanning capital markets origination, trading and sales, a fixed income primary dealership, a market-leading equities institutional brokerage, a new Non-banking Finance Company, and GMC Mumbai. Pavan is Chairperson of the World Economic Forum’s “Global Agenda Council” on Biodiversity, and a speaker at Davos. He serves on the boards of Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), Conservation International (CI) and on UNDP’s Advisory Panel on the Human Development Report and its Human Development Index (HDI). He has been awarded the McKluskey Fellowship, 2011, by Yale University.

Dr Thomas Elmqvist professor in Natural Resource Management at Stockholm University. He is coordinating a major interdisciplinary research themes as part of the Stockholm Resilience Centre focusing on governance and management of ecosystem services in urban landscapes, involving 12 cities around the world.He was involved in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and principal investigator of several multidisciplinary projects in Africa.He serves as associated editor for the journals Ecology and Society, Conservation and Society, Ambio and Sustainability Science. He is currently a co-chair  of the Science Committee bioSustainability, as part of Diversitas and participate in the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity project. He is the Theme leader of cities and Bio-diversity outlook

Dr. Mark Hostetler is a Professor, Department of Wildlife Ecology & Conservation, University of Florida. With over twenty years of experience in urban wildlife and green development issues, Dr. Hostetler conducts research and outreach on how urban landscapes could be designed and managed, from small to large scales, to conserve biodiversity. He has extensive experience in working with homeowners, developers, and policy makers on ways to manage and design residential developments for biodiversity.  Dr. Hostetler co-founded University of Florida’s Program for Resource Efficient Communities and collaborates with an interdisciplinary team of scientists and graduate students. Dr. Hostetler works with policy makers, developers, and homeowners to establish natural resource conservation strategies in communities that are billed as “green” developments. In particular, he conducts a national continuing education course on conserving biodiversity in subdivision development, and he has recently published a book titled, The Green Leap: Conserving Biodiversity in Subdivision Development.

Dr. Madhusudan Katti is an Associate Professor of Vertebrate Ecology in the Department of Biology at California State University in Fresno. He is an evolutionary ecologist who discovered birds as an undergrad after growing up a nature-oblivious urban kid near Bombay, went chasing after vanishing wildernesses in the Himalaya and Western Ghats as a graduate student, and returned to the city grown up as a reconciliation ecologist. He studies ecological and evolutionary processes in more or less human dominated ecosystems with the goal of applying our understanding of these processes towards reconciling biodiversity conservation with human development. He is currently the Lead Principal Investigator and Project Director of the multidisciplinary Urban Long-Term Research Area - Fresno And Clovis Ecosocial Study (ULTRA-FACES; http://urban-faces.org/) project, where he studies the interactions between water policy, human water use, and urban biodiversity. He is also Co-Principal Investigator of an NCEAS (National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis)  Working Group on the comparative ecology of urban biodiversity in cities worldwide (http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/featured/aronson). Other research in his laboratory addresses the behavioral consequences of human activities in urban habitats in other species, such as the effects of urban noise on bird song, and the effects of supplementary feeding on the foraging ecology of squirrels and birds. He is Guest Editor for a special forthcoming issue of Cities and the Environment journal (http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cate/) focusing on the ULTRA network. He serves on the Board of Directors of Fresno Audubon Society (http://fresnoaudubon.org/), the Science Advisory Board of Desert Biodiversity (http://www.desertbiodiversity.org/), the Advisory Board of Current Conservation. (http://currentconservation.org/) and the Editorial Board of Indian Birds(http://www.indianbirds.in/).

Dr. Glenn Stewart is a Professor of Urban Ecology, Department of Environmental Management, Lincoln University, New Zealand. He graduated from undergraduate and master’s degrees in NZ before completing his PhD at Oregon State University in the USA in 1985. He has published over 200 refereed journal articles, conference proceedings, books, book chapters and presented his research at over 100 international and national conferences and workshops. He has also given invited lectures and seminars at numerous national and international institutions. After over twenty years experience as a forest ecologist Professor Stewart turned his attention to urban forestry and urban biodiversity some 10 years ago. He now conducts research on the compositional variation in urban plant communities and how these communities can be enhanced by design using indigenous species. The focus of this research is on unique Southern Hemisphere urban ecosystems and current issues with invasive species, successional processes and predicted changes in global climate. He is an Associate Editor of Plant Ecology, on the editorial Board of Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, the President of Southern Connection, the Deputy Director of the Isaac Centre for Nature Conservation, and a member of the URBIO Advisory Board.

We are inviting more speakers. Please visit the page again later.