Sepideh Afsari is a lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington. She is an urban planner with research interests in regulatory planning, community development planning, place and placemaking, and cultural and creative cities. She primarily uses mix methods to explore complex interrelations between people and place, built environment and regulatory systems.

Riley is a Senior Water and Civil Engineer at Bligh Tanner, with an interest in climate-adaptive urbanism, green infrastructure and water-sensitive urban design. His experience includes managing multi-disciplinary teams on coastal adaptation, waterway renaturalisation, water-sensitive urban design and public open-space projects. Riley is a TedX speaker and regular guest-lecturer on adaptation. Lysani is a Civil and Water Engineer with an interest in better understanding the impacts of climate change on flooding in urban and coastal regions and working towards solutions for adaptation and resilience. Lysani recently completed extensive flood modelling for one of Australia’s most-significant climate change adaptation projects.

Simon Kingham is Professor of Geography at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, NZ. He teaches and researches on a range of urban wellbeing issues with a specific focus on transport. He was seconded to the NZ Ministry of Transport as Chief Science Advisor for six years till May 2024

Sophie Lavaud is a senior policy analyst in the OECD Environment Directorate. As such, Sophie supports government in the implementation of climate adaptation agendas and leads projects on water scarcity and wildfire risks as well as climate resilient infrastructure.

Carmen is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of the Sunshine Coast and an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award Recipient. Her research explores local scale capacity for climate resilience; building on two decades of research and practice in climate adaptation and coastal management.