is a Fellow in the Legal Affairs Division at the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Mauritius where she specialises in Environmental and Climate Change Policy and Law. She is currently a distance learning doctoral student at the University of Western Australia where her PhD focuses on the loss and damage principle. She is an environmental, climate, gender and disability activist. She has published articles and book chapters on the topic of environmental and climate change law, human rights, gender, sustainable tourism and ocean governance. She is the founder and CEO of Climate Justice Compact, a research think tank which focuses on climate justice from a multidisciplinary and multistakeholder perspective. She is the Vice President of CUT, an NGO which works on harm reduction in Mauritius. She is the co-founder and co-director of Mind Matters Mauritius which is a social enterprise empowering people living with mental health conditions.

is a Senior Research Associate at the Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS). His research focuses on European ocean governance and marine policy. In particular, he aims to identify and understand governance arrangements which break through established institutional and societal barriers, fostering progress towards the achievement of the EU’s Green Deal and other cross-sector policy objectives. From 2018 to 2022 he was the co-lead of the STRONG High Seas project (Strengthening Regional Ocean Governance for the High Seas), a project that aimed to facilitate the development of comprehensive, cross-sectoral approaches for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in the high seas, focusing on the Southeast Atlantic and Southeast Pacific regions.

works as research group leader at the Research Institute for Sustainability - Helmholtz Centre Potsdam (RIFS). She is particularly interested in research ethics, transdisciplinary and co-creative/co-productive research methods, decoloniality and Indigenous rights in research. Following her studies in International Economics and Development Studies at the University of Bayreuth and the University of Oxford, she completed a DPhil (PhD) at the University of Oxford's School of Geography and the Environment, which was focused on public participation and extractive resource management in Kaalallit Nunaat (Greenland).

is a Human Geographer with a focus on political geography, energy geographies, political ecology, environmental justice, and the coloniality of climate politics. He is Social Justice Fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam since 2022 and Research Associate at the Centre for Advances Studies “Futures of Sustainability” at the University of Hamburg since 2019, focusing on different trajectories of sustainability and their contradictions and conflicts. He received his doctorate from the University of Kiel in 2017, where he investigated the justice dimensions of the claim for food sovereignty in the Bolivian context. From 2018 to 2019, he worked at WWF Germany as a consultant in the field of soy supply chains and sustainable animal feed.

studied Political Science and Sociology in Stuttgart (Germany) and Florence (Italy), and holds a PhD in Sociology. Her research focuses on understanding and strengthening the transformative potentials of entrepreneurship. She works as a facilitator at the international level, bringing together decision-makers and researchers in order to bridge the gap between knowledge and action.

At the RIFS, she is involved in both transformation research and transformative research that examines the efforts of entrepreneurs to become responsible actors in the eco-social-system and explores opportunities to support the co-creation of responsible solutions by entrepreneurs, policymakers and scientists.

is a Full professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Technology at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. He has been director of the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis at KIT (ITAS) since 1999 and Director of the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag in Berlin since 2002.
After university education in physics, mathematics, and philosophy, he received a PhD in theoretical Solid State Physics from Cologne University in 1987 and a habilitation at Marburg University in 1998 with a Venia Legendi in Philosophy. His research fields include technology assessment, ethics of new technologies, digitalization, theory of sustainable development, sustainability research, and the epistemology of inter- and transdisciplinary research.
In his professional work, Armin Grunwald is member of several advisory commissions and committees in various fields of the technological advance, e.g. of the German Ethics Council and the National Board on Nuclear Waste disposal. He is an author and editor of multiple professional and reseatarch publications, among them “Technology Assessment in Practice and Theory” (Routledge 2019).
More about Armin Grunwald can be found www.itas.kit.edu/english/staff_grunwald_armin.php

is a PhD Fellow in the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology section at TU Delft, in the Netherlands. In his thesis he explores the ethical and societal implications of researching (and potentially deploying) climate engineering technologies, with a specific focus on solar radiation management through stratospheric aerosol injection. Ben works with the baseline assumption that decisions surrounding such technologies will have to be made under normative uncertainty – situations wherein we lack both the epistemic and the moral information necessary to make an unequivocally acceptable decision. The session will provide a rough outline on the ethical issues surrounding climate engineering with an emphasis on the potential societal effects, drawing from a broad range of scholarship, such as ethics/philosophy of technology, political theory, and environmental ethics. Prior knowledge in any of the fields is not necessary, and Ben aims for a highly interactive and engaging talk and discussion.

is a political scientist from Recife, Brazil. He is currently Research Associate at the RIFS-Potsdam. His research interests include US foreign policy, critical security studies, trans-disciplinary Research and the intersection of geopolitics and eco-politics, with the Peruvian Amazon as the study case. He has worked at international organisations and think tanks in Europe and Latin America. He graduated in Social Sciences at the Federal University of Pernambuco, holds an MSc in comparative politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a PhD degree in political science from the Freie Universität Berlin.

is project lead at Wissenschaft im Dialog. Due to her degree in in social sciences, her experiences in crisis communication, in a scientific European research project on intercultural dialogue as well as in the top hotel industry, she has a special interest in interpersonal communication. Therefore, the development of participatory programmes, their inclusive design and a constructive dialogue on scientific topics are of great importance to her.
At Wissenschaft im Dialog, she is responsible, among other projects, for the interactive discussion series "Wissenschaft kontrovers" (Science controversial) in the Science Year 2023 - Our Universe.

is an associate professor of Science and Technology Policy and Vice Dean for Talent Management & Diversity at the School of Social Sciences and Technology, Technical University of Munich. Her work explores the nexus of science, technology, society, and policy, focusing particularly on how institutional norms and values shape and interact with scientific knowledge production practices, on emergent knowledge cultures in the life sciences and biomedicine, and on the circulation and interpretation of life science knowledge and biotechnologies in society and policy. Across all her research topics, she emphasizes questions of social justice and equity, as well as responsible research and innovation practices.

is a Brazilian Research Associate at the Research Institute for Sustainability and Fellow of the Nippon Foundation University of Edinburgh Ocean Voices Programme. During her PhD, she examined the need and potential for the incorporation of Ecosystem-based Management into the deep-sea mining regulatory and governance regime administered by the International Seabed Authority in areas beyond national jurisdiction. She currently participates in several expert networks that collaborate to ocean conservation, including the advisory board for the Women’s League for the Ocean (since 2019) and the Deep Ocean Stewardship Initiative (since 2021), where she is also a member of the Minerals and co-coordinator of the Central and South Atlantic Working Group of the Programme Challenger 150. Her main interests include early career researchers/professionals, capacity development, gender and the use of science for decision making.

Judith is a freelancing social scientist, facilitator and campaigner at the intersection of democracy and climate justice activism with a firm conviction that radical transformations are possible. Having started her career as a bank clerk, she herself has seen her life transform profoundly once she realized how severe the climate crisis is. In her current work, she is interested in individual and collective agencies in the Anthropocene and how they change as crises around the world escalate. With an intersectional approach she discovers what fears and perceptions limit our own sense of agency, meaning our ability to act in accordance with our values and our understanding of consternation and injustice. Her guiding questions are: What empowers us, what holds us back and what skills do we need in order to transform our societies?

Aliaksei (Alex) Patonia is a Research Fellow in commercial hydrogen development at the Energy Transition Research Initiative (ETRI). He joined the hydrogen module at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies after being a Visiting Research Fellow and working primarily with the Institute's Electricity Programme. As a key part of the ETRI, the hydrogen module aims to develop objective, realistic and unique insights into the challenges and opportunities of the evolving hydrogen economy.

Alex started his research at OIES as an OIES-Aramco Fellow in 2019 when he investigated the use of ammonia as a storage solution for future decarbonized energy systems. In his later research, he focused on power-to hydrogen technologies and the possibilities to reduce the cost of electrolysers - the key technology involved in the generation of 'green' hydrogen.

Apart from his work at OIES, Alex has cooperated with a number of research institutions and think tanks such as the GMFUS of Washington, DC and the EPG of Bucharest. His commentaries and op-eds appeared, among others, in the Diplomat, EU Observer, Geopolitical Monitor, Natural Gas World, Apolitical, and Petroleum Review of the Energy Institute.

is the Head of the German Arctic Office at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), which serves as an information and cooperation platform between German stakeholders from science, politics and industry. Before moving to the German Arctic Office in 2017, he served as the Executive Secretary of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) in Stockholm and Potsdam since 2006.
Dr. Rachold graduated as a geo-chemist from Göttingen University, where he also obtained his Ph.D. in 1994. Since then he worked with the AWI. His research is focused on land-ocean interactions in the Siberian Arctic and he led several land- and ship-based Russian-German expeditions.

is presently serving as a Junior Professor of Medical Ethics with a focus on digitalisation at the University of Potsdam, Faculty of Health Sciences Brandenburg. In addition to his professorship, Robert leads the research group on "Ethics of Genome Editing" at the Institute for Ethics and History of Medicine at the University of Tuebingen. He also conducts guest lectures, e.g. at the Hasso Plattner Institute Potsdam. Robert´s research and teaching interests center around the multi-faceted field of ethics, especially where technology, society, and politics intersect. His central focus lies in addressing the ethical and social implications of digital and biotechnologies. Beyond his academic and research roles, Robert is a certified trainer for ethics consultation in healthcare and contributes to several ethics commissions, committees, and ethics advisory boards.

is professor of political theory at the University of Potsdam (UP). Fabian's primary research interests lie in climate ethics, social (in)justice, and risk ethics. Fabian is one of the founders of the Just Climate Transition network (https://justclimatetransitions.com/), which brings together scholars working on different aspects of climate transition.
In earlier research projects Fabian looked at issues such as land rights in a changing climate, de-territorialising sovereignty when it comes to governing natural resources, and the role of feasibility arguments in climate justice discourses. At the moment, Fabian works together with Janina Walkenhorst (UP) on a project looking at the role of citizen participation in urban climate governance.

is a Fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability, Helmholtz-Centre Potsdam (RIFS, formerly the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies or IASS). He is Deputy Chair of the Ocean Law Specialist Group of the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law and Lead of the Commission on Ecosystem Management's Thematic Group on Deep Seabed Mining. Pradeep regularly attends multilateral ocean negotiations, including the meetings of the International Seabed Authority, and advises several governments on deep seabed mining, ocean governance and marine biodiversity conservation in areas beyond national jurisdiction. He holds an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, an LL.M. in Global Environment and Climate Change Law from the University of Edinburgh, and an LL.B (First Class Honors) from the University of Malaya in his home country Malaysia.

is a management and organization researcher currently working at Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development. Her work aims at contributing to sustainably transforming the ways we organize our working and living together on this planet. Her intellectual practice develops at the intersection between artistic and economic modes of production and focuses on alternative ways of organizing, relational ontologies as well as aesthetics and affect as specific organizational forces that might enable more sustainable relationships with other human and non-human beings.
After her PhD at the University of Essex on collaborative transdisciplinary learning environments, she worked at the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre on artistic interventions and organizational learning. Since then she collaborates with different performance artists to further an understanding of the complex, shifting and ephemeral qualities of alternative ways of organising that allow nurturing and caring relationships at and beyond work. In 2022, Anke Strauss has been a Fellow at IASS (now RIFS).

is a research associate of the transdisciplinary Research Group "Democratic Governance and Ecopolitical Transformations” (EcoPol) and part of the Focal Topic “Justice in Sustainability” Coordination team at the Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS) Potsdam. She holds a MA in International Development Studies from Philipps-Universität Marburg and a BA in Political Science and Economics from Universität Potsdam.
With the EcoPol group she partakes in the research on the relationships of democracy and ecopolitics, focusing on topics such as climate change regime, environmental justice and ecopolitical trans-territorialities (rivers, forests, etc). The EcoPol group is currently working on a transdisciplinary case study in the Amazon basin. With the Justice Focal Topic she explores distributional, procedural and recognitional justice aspects of sustainability transformations.
Before joining the RIFS she worked for several years in political and technical development cooperation in Latin America. During this time, she coordinated multi-stakeholder and transdisciplinary dialogues and knowledge exchange from the local to the international level. Her work focused on sustainable development, environmental participation, social ecological transformation as well as climate policy and adaptation.

as a facilitator, systems scientist and activist, I am passionate about social transformation. I provide leadership on systems change, with institutions such as the UN, NGOs and with companies. My work is rooted in theory and practice in systems change, social justice, foresight, innovation, learning, collective healing and leadership.

I have worked the last 20 years as a sustainability practitioner and systems scientist across the world from Asia, Australia, Africa to South America. Most of my work has focussed on sustainable production, consumption, and trade and the art of collective processes such as stakeholder engagement, Global North-South collaboration, co-creation, and organisational development.

I have published over 30 papers in international journals, and continue to publish when I have time.