Alvina is a scholar with degrees in law, history, and Māori studies (PhD, Waikato). Her career combines academia and community service as a Māori mentor, researcher, and advocate. Her work on Māori identity, legal frameworks, and social justice demonstrates her commitment to cultural preservation and improving Māori representation and well-being.

Christina researches the governance of risk reduction and climate change adaptation, focusing on environmental planning. An important theme is applying managed retreats to reduce risks to human lives, assets, and ecosystems. Special focus areas include resource management instruments and frameworks, planning methods, spatial planning, collaborative planning and community resilience.

Emily is a principal scientist in natural hazards and hydrodynamic focusing on flood, tsunami and storm surge inundation. She currently leads Mā te haumaru ō te wai - an Endeavour programme focused on understanding Aotearoa's flood inundation hazard and risk at a national level and using this to improve our resilience to flooding.

Silvia researches catchment scale planning for water sensitive city-regions and participates in interdisciplinary research on climate change adaptation, community planning for disaster recovery and resilience, and action/ intervention research applied to planning for climate change adaptation. She publishes on water resource management, climate change adaptation, and urban and regional planning.

Rebecca McNaught is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University Centre for Rural Health in Lismore, New South Wales, Australia. Her current research focuses on collaborative forms of disaster and climate change governance, community members as agents of change and the health implications of disasters and displacement. She currently volunteers as co-leader of the South Golden Beach Community Resilience Team.

David Schlosberg is Professor of Environmental Politics, Director of the Sydney Environment Institute

Anna Sturman is a Lecturer in Human Geography within the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney. Prior to this, Anna was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Sydney Environment Institute on the project, 'Developing systems and capacities for protecting animals during catastrophic fires'. Anna works at the intersections of political economy and ecology, economic and political geographies, and rural sociology to examine critical climate adaptation pathways in colonial-capitalist economies.

Scott Webster is a postdoctoral researcher at the Sydney Environment Institute. Scott has previously investigated how communities self-organised before, during, and after the 2019-20 bushfires and multiple major floods in New South Wales since 2020. His research broadly explores connection to place: its meaningfulness, the knowledges and interventions it enables, and the suffering and injustice caused when these connections are ruptured.