Adam Sobel is a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He studies the dynamics of climate and weather phenomena, including extreme events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts. He directs the Columbia Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate. In recent years Sobel has received awards from the American Meteorological Society, the AXA Research Fund, and the American Geophysical Union. Sobel is author or co-author of over 100 peer-reviewed scientific articles, and his book about Hurricane Sandy, Storm Surge, received the 2014 Atmospheric Science Librarians International Choice Award in the popular category.

www.harpercollins.com/9780062304780/storm-surge

Alain Bourque earned a graduate in meteorology at McGill University (1989) and an M.Sc. in atmospheric science at UQAM (1996). From 1989 to 2001, he worked as a meteorologist and climatologist at Environment Canada, where he was involved in several projects related to adapting to the impacts of extreme events and climate change and in the climate analyses of the 1996 Saguenay flood and the 1998 ice storm. In 2001, he joined the newly formed Ouranos Consortium where he developed and implemented the Impacts and Adaptation Program, allowing the production of more than 200 projects and initiatives. He is Ouranos’CEO since 2013. He was involved in different scientific synthesis at international (IPCC), national and regional scales and he is regularly invited to speak on the science of climate change and the related impacts to scientific conferences and other audiences, and  has explained the science of climate change and the stakes for Quebec at several media events.

www.ouranos.ca

Alexandre is managing partner at XPND, an investment firm in technology, media and entertainment companies.  He is the co-founder and former CEO of Stingray Digital, a media company based in Montreal that owns and operates Galaxie, the leading broadcast radio stations available on TV in Canada, as well as The Karaoke Channel, the largest karaoke company in North America and Europe, and Stingray360 (formerly Chum Satellite Services), the leading commercial music provider in Canada. A seasoned entrepreneur in the software and media industry, he is the founder of Nurun, a company he sold to Quebecor in 1996, and of Hexacto, a wireless gaming company, now owned by EA Mobile.

Alexandre is Chairman of the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art and sits on various boards, including BeHaviour, gsmprjct°, iPerceptions and Lumenpulse

www.xpnd.com/en

Andrée-Lise, founder and Managing Partner at Cycle Capital Management, has 20 years of experience in venture capital, management and engineering. She has set up an investment platform specialized in cleantechs totaling more than 230 million dollars and which brings together industrial, institutional and strategic investors. Through her carreer, she developed a network of top-notch partnerships, from businesses, industrials and environmental backgrounds.

www.cyclecapital.com/en

Andrew Winston is a globally recognized expert on how companies can navigate and profit from humanity’s biggest challenges. His views on strategy have been sought after by many of the world’s leading companies, including Boeing, HP, J&J, Kimberly-Clark, PepsiCo, PwC, and Unilever. Andrew's latest book, The Big Pivot has been selected among the "Best Business Books of 2014" by Strategy+Business magazine. His first book, Green to Gold, was the topselling green business title of the last decade and was included in Inc. Magazine’s all-time list of 30 books that every manager should own. Andrew’s speeches around the world, including a TED talk, provide a practical and optimistic roadmap to help leaders build resilient, thriving companies and communities in a volatile world. Andrew received degrees in economics, business, and environmental management from Princeton, Columbia, and Yale.

www.andrewwinston.com

Arona Soumare, (Program Specialist, Négociations Internationales Environnement et Développement Durable, Institut de la Francophonie pour le développement durable – IFDD (International Negotiations and Sustainable Development, The Francophonie’s Institute for Sustainable Development)) has over 18 years of experience in the field of environmental policy and natural resources management, as a geographer and environmentalist within multidisciplinary teams, as a teacher, researcher, project leader and Conservation Director for the WWF West Africa (2008-2013), and as Senior Natural Resources Management Specialist at the Islamic Development Bank (2013-2015).

For more than 10 years, he was responsible for the technical coordination within the WWF for rounds of multilateral environment agreement negotiations, namely for the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and RIO+20.

Mr. Soumare holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Dakar (Senegal), a Master of Science in Environmental Impact Assessment from the University of Wales, UK, a Master of Arts in International Affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, USA, and a Certificate in Environmental Management from the University of California, Berkeley, USA.

For his scientific publications, Mr. Soumare received a START Young Scientist Award in 2000.

www.ifdd.francophonie.org

A renowned explorer and mountaineer, Bernard Voyer has over 30 years of expeditions and adventures to his credit. He knows the three poles of the Earth: he reached the North Pole in 1994, the South Pole in 1996 and in 1999 he stood on the roof of the world, Mount Everest (8,850 metres). Among other challenges, in 2001 he completed his World Tour by climbing the highest peak on every continent, making him the first North American explorer to have managed this exploit.

Bernard is a renowned speaker who has given close to 1,000 inspirational presentations in English and French, in Canada, the United States, Europe and Japan, to audiences totalling more than 300,000 to date. He was also a guest speaker for the NASA astronauts, in Houston, Texas, in February 2005.                      

He has received many tributes for his outstanding career, including the titles of Knight of the Ordre National du Québec, Officer of the Order of Canada and Knight of the Legion of Honour in France, and has received two honorary doctorates and the medal of the Assemblée nationale du Québec. In addition, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society awarded him its highest distinction, the prestigious gold medal.

In 2002, he was recognized by the Governor General of Canada as one of the 50 greatest Canadians of the past 50 years. That same year, Canada Post issued a series of stamps celebrating mountains, and paid tribute to him. In 2003, he was decorated by the Prince of Nepal with the medallion given to every climber who had reached the top of Mount Everest. The same year, Bernard Voyer was honoured by his hero, Sir Edmund Hillary, for his Adventure Grand Slam, recognizing his exceptional career as a polar explorer and mountain climber. In May 2008, he was named Honorary Lieutenant-Colonel of the 2^nd Canadian Rangers Patrol Group.

Today, he is actively working with young people, particularly aboriginal people of Canada, as demonstrated by his support for a number of foundations. His commitment to and respect for nature inspired him to serve as an Ambassador for the Quebec Division of Nature Conservancy of Canada and to sit on the organization’s Board. He is a Member of the Board of the Ordre National du Québec and Vice-President of the Canadian Foundation for Cross-Cultural Dialogue. He was appointed a Governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and Ambassador for Les Offices jeunesse internationaux du Québec (LOJIQ).

Photo Credit : Sylvain Foster

www.bernardvoyer.com

Bill McKibben is an author and environmentalist who in 2014 was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel.’ His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages; he’s gone on to write a dozen more books. He is a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, which has organized twenty  thousand rallies around the world in every country save North Korea, spearheaded the resistance to the Keystone Pipeline, and launched the fast-growing fossil fuel divestment movement.  

Photo Credit : Nancy Battaglia

350.org

Mr. Brice Lalonde is Special Advisor on Sustainable development to the UN Global Compact. As his most recent achievement, he founded and chaired the first Business and Climate Summit, prior to the COP21 in May 2015 Paris (6 million companies represented, a dialogue of more than 1600 policy-makers and business representatives each day). Prior to this, Mr. Lalonde had been UN Executive Coordinator for the Rio+20 conference during two years, from the preparation of the conference to the beginning of its implementation. Mr. Lalonde is a former French Ambassador for climate change international negotiations.

Prior to this, he served as French Minister for the Environment from 1988 to 1992, Chairman of the Round Table for Sustainable Development at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and Senior Advisor for the Environment to the French Government. In addition, he held the position of Director of the Paris office of the Institute for a European Environment Policy. Mr. Lalonde graduated from the Sorbonne University with a degree in classics and law.

As French Minister for the Environment, he was very strongly involved in global issues and contributed to the Basel Convention; Madrid Treaty on Antarctica; Whale Sanctuary; Ban on Ivory Trade; management of the Rio Climate Convention; world NGO meeting before Rio; creation of the GEF; contribution to the European Union Environmental Policy (water, waste, nature protection, lead-free gasoline, catalytic converters). At the national level included: setting up French laws on water and waste, coastline and mountain conservation regulations, setting up the French Agency for the Environment and Energy Efficiency (the ADEME), among others.

www.unglobalcompact.org/

"I obtained by Ph.D. from Duke University, North Carolina, and since then I have always worked on issues related to global climate change.  I am Professor in the Department of Biology at McGill University in Montreal where I hold the Canada Research Chair on Climate Change Mitigation and Tropical Forest (Tier 1). I have also been working with the Embera people of Panama since 1994 which helped me in developing participatory approaches to integrate the human dimension in biological analysis. My currently research in Panama spans a broad range of issues from remote sensing to capacity building and conflict resolution the unifying theme being forest conservation and climate change. During my carrier I have edited two books and published >100 scientific journal articles or book chapters. I served as Panama’s negotiator of REDD in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (2005-2009). I am currently leading the Sustainable Canada Dialogues, an initiative that mobilizes scholars from across Canada to propose a blue print for Canada’s transition to a low carbon economy."

sustainablecanadadialogues.ca

Claire Nouvian is an environmentalist dedicated to protecting the distant and vulnerable deep sea from destructive fishing practices. She is committed to putting an end to deep-sea bottom trawling and advocates before governments and institutions to that effect. In 2004, she founded the nonprofit organization BLOOM. In 2013 Claire developed a petition against deep-sea bottom trawling which has collected nearly 900,000 signatures, making it France’s n°1 environmental petition in History, and triggering the largest deep-sea fishing fleet in France to stop deep-sea bottom trawling below 800 meters of depth.

Claire used to work in television production and journalism, specializing in wildlife and scientific documentaries. Claire put together the book The Deep (translated into 11 languages), and the eponymous exhibition, which is still traveling the world and has already attracted over 2.3 million visitors.

Claire Nouvian lectures on environmental political science, public subsidies in fisheries, and communication strategy. The French GEO magazine named her ‘the planet’s guardian angel’. Claire has lived in several countries and speaks six languages.

www.bloomassociation.org/en

Corinne Lepage is a lawyer and French female politican. She was Minister of the Environment from 1995 to 1997 and a Member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2014. In 1996, she founded the Citizenship, Action, Participation for the 21^st Century (CAP 21) Party, which became a political movement in 2000. In 2012 she founded Essaim, a research institute, and the following year, Rassemblement citoyen, a cooperative political movement. In 2014, she became head of the LRC – CAP21 party. At the request of French President François Hollande, she’s currently in charge of drafting The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, considered a stepping stone towards the recognition of environmental rights for future generations.

droitshumanite.fr/DU/?lang=en

Daniel Pearl co-founded l’OEUF.(L'Office de l'Éclectisme Urbain et Fonctionnel) in 1992, in order to concentrate his expertise in sustainable and environmental design. In recent years, L’OEUF’s partners have expanded to include Bernard Olivier and Sudhir Suri.

Operating between mainstream architectural practice and advanced academic research, Daniel and his co-workers, have developed an architecture that attempts to respond to, reveal and exploit the latent social and environmental characteristics of a particular context as a basis for l’OEUF’s numerous housing and institutional projects. Over the past decade, Daniel has been involved in and has led numerous design charrettes from individual scale buildings to sustainable community plans for over 10 000 people.

A tenured half-time associate professor at the school of architecture at the University of Montréal (UdeM) he is also a founding board member of the Canada Green Building Council and founding Chair of the academic education committee. Daniel’s academic and professional research has involved both comprehensive documentation of L’OEUF’s experimental practice (community housing projects such as “Benny Farm” and “Atelier d’habitation saine” – AHS in Rosemont,  Montreal, for both the FCM and CMHC) and innovative theoretical research (on both IDP and ecologically sensitive housing construction techniques for both NRCan and CMHC) carried out as a university professor.

www.loeuf.com/?lang=en

Etienne Doyon is a seasoned international solidarity professional and has been with Carrefour de solidarité internationale since 2009. He has a diversified background in international solidarity which includes 15 years of experience as a project officer, managing projects and internships in West Africa. His expertise stems from project development, more specifically the creation of educational programs on citizen participation, food security, local development, and the environment. He also holds a technical diploma in applied ecology.

www.csisher.com

Geoff Garver is a doctoral candidate in geography at McGill University and Coordinator of the Economics for the Anthropocene partnership (E4A). He has a B.S. (chemical engineering) from Cornell University (1982), a J.D. cum laude from Michigan Law School (1987), and an LL.M. from McGill University (2011). From 2000-2007, he was Director of Submissions on Enforcement Matters at the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. He has also worked for the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. District Judge Conrad Cyr. Mr. Garver co-authored Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy (2009), and has several published articles and book chapters.

e4a-net.org/

Jean Jouzel is a Research Director at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). His main scientific involvement has been with the reconstruction of past climate changes from ice cores. He has participated to major ice core international projects and is an author or co-author of about 400 publications. He is currently vice chair of the working Group I panel of IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, 2007 Nobel Prize for peace) and is member of the CESE (French Social, Economic and Environmental Council). In 2012, He has been awarded the Vetlesen Prize, considered to be the « Earth Sciences » equivalent of a Nobel.

www.ipcc.ch

Holding a Master of Advanced Studies in Applied Chemical Kinetics from the University of Paris VI (France) and an MBA in Management (USA, San Francisco), with further training in public finances and company management from the Institut de l'Économie et des Finances de Libreville (Gabon), Jean-Pierre Ndoutoum worked for Gabon’s Ministry of Mines, Energy and Oil as a research officer for six years (1990-1996), and also as Director of Economic and Financial Overview Analyses.

In 1996, he joined the ranks of the Institut de la Francophonie pour le développement durable (IFDD) in Quebec City (Canada), as a Program Specialist for Energy Policies (access and management, and renewable energy). He also has vast experience with international organizations (World Bank Group, African Development Bank Group, ASECNA (Agency for Aerial Navigation Safety in Africa and Madagascar), UEMOA (West African Economic and Monetary Union, or WAEMU), and the United Nations System). Mr. Ndoutoum also has practical experience with member nations of the OIF (Organisation internationale de la francophonie).

Mr. Ndoutoum, who came into office on April 1, 2015, took over from Ms. Fatimata Dia, director of the Institut from 2007 to March 2015.

www.ifdd.francophonie.org

Jérôme holds a BSc. in Agronomy, a MSc. in Environmental Sciences from the engineering school ISARA in Lyon, France, a MSc. in Political Sciences from Université Montesquieu in Bordeaux and a Ph.D. in Life Sciences from Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes La Sorbonne. He coordinated biodiversity inventories with the University of California, Berkeley, and worked with the local government in French Polynesia on a climate change strategy. He also worked with the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Brussels on EU overseas territories and at various research centers in Australia, Burkina Faso, Nepal, and France. Jérôme directs Pew’s Global Ocean Legacy project in French Polynesia.The Global Ocean Legacy team is working to establish the world’s first generation of great marine parks by securing the designation of large, fully protected reserves.  To date, their efforts have helped to double the amount of safeguarded ocean habitat worldwide.

www.pewtrusts.org/en/projects/global-ocean-legacy-french-polynesia

Karel Mayrand is Director general for Quebec and the Atlantic with the David Suzuki Foundation and chair of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project in Canada. He is the author of Une Voix pour la Terre (Boréal, 2012). He is board member of the Conseil régional de l’environnement de Montréal, of Quebec’s Environmental Law Center and of the Fondation Cowboys Fringants.
Before joining the Foundation, Karel advised several UN agencies as well as Quebec’s former Premier, Pierre Marc Johnson, on globalization and sustainability issues, for over a decade.  He was co-founder in 2002 of Unisféra International Centre, a sustainability think-tank, where he created Planetair, a leading Canadian provider of carbon offsets and climate solutions. Karel is author of the Manifesto for a Global Movement (2015) and co-author of Governing Global Desertification, published in 2006 by Ashgate Aldershot (London). He is an Action Canada fellow (2005) and was finalist in 2008 for the Arista Prize as Social entrepreneur of the year in Quebec.

www.davidsuzuki.org

Kathleen Rogers, President of Earth Day Network, has worked more than 20 years as an environmental attorney and advocate, focusing on public policy, international law, litigation, and community development. Earth Day Network is a powerful movement builder that has grown into global network of tens of thousands of organizations, elected officials, and people in 192 countries. Under Kathleen's leadership, Earth Day Network has taken the lead in building environmental democracy year-round in the U.S and abroad, transforming the organization into a platform to engage, educate and activate communities, especially in low-income and underserved areas.

Kathleen has held senior positions with the National Audubon Society, the Environmental Law Institute, two U.S. Olympic Organizing Committees, and the United Nations Conference on Women. She has also worked for Garth Associates in New York City and the Beveridge & Diamond law firm, where she developed a white collar environmental crime defense practice. Kathleen was editor in chief of the law review at the University of California-Davis Law Review, and clerked for the Honorable John Pratt at the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

www.earthday.org

A revolutionary with a smile, Laure Waridel fell into citizen engagement as a young child. Over the last 25 years, she has worn both the work boots of major ecological solidarity endeavours and the velvet gloves of sustainable-development work. As a woman with a big heart and a rigorous approach, she recently undertook doctoral studies on the emergence of an ecologically- and socially-minded economy at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, for which she won a prestigious Trudeau Scholarship.

In 1997, at the age of 24, Laure. Waridel published her first essay: Coffee with a Cause. In it, she presented the results of research she had conducted in a coffee co-operative in Mexico at the conclusion of her studies at McGill University. The work catapulted her onto the media spotlight, which gave her a strong platform to launch the idea of fair trade in Québec, then mostly unknown in North America.

She also used her media presence to promote Équiterre, an organization she co-founded in 1993 and for which she presented over 250 lectures, mostly in Québec, but also in Ontario, British Columbia, the United States, Europe, Mexico, Senegal and Colombia. Her books, Acheter c’est voter and L’envers de l’assiette, quickly became best-sellers in Québec and references in the development of fair trade and responsible consumption.

Photo Credit : Isabelle Clément

www.cirodd.org

"I was born in Nova-Scotia, Canada, in 1961, in the small town of Greenwood. In 1990, I obtained the job of my dreams: journalist for the program North-South (Télé-Québec). My first mission: South Africa because Nelson Mandela had just been freed. In the dozen or so documentaries I did, one of them required interviewing Jay Naidoo, the general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, COSATU, to understand the role of the trade unions in the liberation of the country. And that is how I found, under the same roof, my dream – international correspondant – and the love of my life. I hence covered the whole Mandela era, from his liberation from prison to the end of his presidency, and beyond. Before the first multiracial elections in 1994, it was very tense in South Africa, and violence had become a loud language. I did two television documentaries on rape (Every 83 seconds) and domestic violence (When Love hurts). I was teaching journalism at the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism to people who had only actually done propaganda for the apartheid government. I was making documentaries on the kids living in townships, victims of the terribly crazy ideas of the apartheid regime. I had great fears but I also lived great moments, perhaps the most incredible one of my career being Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as president. To live so close to this great man – he was our neighbour in Cape Town – and to have been such a close witness to his five years in the president’s seat gave me back faith in humanity.

When Nelson Mandela left government in 1999, it was the moment for me to answer the repeated requests from André Bastien, founder of Libre Expression publishing house, to write a book on the historical period. I wrote my first book, Mon Afrique (Conflict of the Heart) a book about the Mandela era (1990-1999) from the apartheid I lived to the birth of democracy I witnessed as a journalist, woman, White, mother of a child in shared custody between two continents, and wife of a minister in Mandela’s government.  Notre Afrique (2006) is the clamoured sequel to Mon Afrique, with a wider view on Africa and the place of this terrible and magnificient continent in the world.  Eva (2005) is an historical novel on the 1960-1990 period in South Africa and answers the question what was it to live under apartheid? through a forbidden and powerful love story. My other novel is the result of having spent years socialising with the greatest revolutionnaries of South Africa: Encore un pont à traverser, (2010) is a social fable set in the West with South African influence, on social justice and the organisation of a revolution, through forbidden love stories. I also wrote a travel guide on South Africa (Comprendre l’Afrique du Sud) in 2011.

The book Demain, il sera trop tard, mon fils (“Tomorrow will be too late, my son” – 2014) was born from a conversation with my son Kami who, at 21 years old only, asks terribly lucid questions about the state of the planet, and who forces us to reflect.

I continue to live between the two continents. Our children are grown up now ; two live in Africa and one in Québec. My husband has been working in development for the past 15 years and wrote a first book Fighting for Justice (Picador Africa, 2010) and is preparing a second one. I continue to give talks in Québec and the message I deliver is that of Nelson Mandela: “The world is a stage where the gestures of all its people are part of the same scene”."

luciepage.com

Mickaël Carlier is the CEO of Novae, the professional media service for social responsibility and sustainable development in Quebec, a company he founded in 2006. A trailblazer at the forefront of emerging sustainable business practices in Quebec, Mr. Carlier has been monitoring the evolution of these best practices for nearly a decade, both in Quebec and around the world.

Novae publications and events are essential reference sources for all professionals who are interested in corporate responsibility. Besides the Novae.ca website, the company has initiated the Corporate Citizen Award, a competition unique to Quebec that highlights achievements in sustainable development, as well as the Momentum Conference, an international rendezvous for innovations in corporate and social responsibility.

As a specialist in communications and social responsibility practices, Mickaël Carlier is often invited to participate in professional events, in both Quebec and France.  In 2011, Mr. Carlier was a finalist in the Arista competition, of the Young Chamber of Commerce of Montreal, in the Socially Responsible Young Business Leader category.

www.novae.ca

Nicolas Hulot was born on April 30, 1955 in Lille (France). He has been a reporter, writer and television program-maker. Ushuaïa Nature, for instance, has been broadcast in 35 countries. In 1990 he established the Nicolas Hulot Foundation for Nature and Mankind, a leading environmental NGO aiming at encouraging changing consumption patterns throughout society (citizens, policy-makers, business people…). He has been chairing it ever since. Through his Foundation, he invited the 2007 French Presidential candidates to commit to an Ecological Pact. The Pact was then backed by around 750 000 people, and it helped put environment high on the political agenda. He was appointed as Special Envoy of the President of the French Republic for Protecting the Planet in December 2012.

www.fondation-nicolas-hulot.org

Philippe Desbrosses doctor in Environmental Sciences (University Paris-VII), Farmer, Conservatory of vegetable seeds of ancient varieties, created 1974. Founder founder of a farm-school : the Organic Farm of Sainte Marthe in Sologne and President of the association Intelligence Verte, for the safeguard of natural genetic diversity. Expert and Consultant at the EU. Co-founder of the main movements of Organic Farming in France and Europe. He is the author of numerous books such as We shall become farmers ! with preface by Abbé Pierre, edit. Le Rocher 1993, re-edited 2014, intervening in the movie Nos enfants nous accuseront from JP Jaud, Coline Serreau's Think Global, Act Rural, Kevin Garreau's Nourrir la vie, Au nom de la Terre from Pierre Rabhi and Marie Monique Delshing.

www.intelligenceverte.org

Pierre-Oliver Pineau (PhD, HEC Montréal, 2000) is a professor at the Department of Decision Sciences of HEC Montréal and holds the Chair in Energy Sector Management since Decembre 2013. He is an energy policy and management specialist, with a focus on electricity reforms. His research focuses on electricity market integration and on optimal approaches to balance energy production and consumption.

He worked in Canada, Africa, Latin America and the Nordic countries and has published papers on all these regions. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the International Journal of Energy Sector Management. He is a member of CIRODD (Interuniversity Research Centre for the Operationalization Sustainable Development) and of CRÉ (Ethics research center). He held positions in Canada at the University of Victoria (School of Public Administration, 2001-2006) and at Concordia University (Economics Department, 2000-2001). He sits on the Board of directors of the Canadian Association for Energy Economics.

energie.hec.ca

Farmer, permaculturalist, teacher, biologist, designer, author and speaker, Mr Sobkowiak has presented more than 500 seminars and workshops to a whole range of publics and groups. Taught at McGill University for 8 years, worked as a biologist and designer in his landscape design practice for 20 years specialising in wildlife habitat designs. He's been designing and inventing since he was a kid and now he tries, unsuccessfully, to restrict himself to permaculture with farming being his latest passion. For the last 20 years, through Miracle Farms, he's worked to transform what was a conventional orchard to a permaculture orchard. Having gone through the required transition period, he then grew organically for 5 years. He realised organic was not the answer. "The Permaculture Orchard" is the result (as documented in the film by the same name).

 Photo Credit : Olivier Asselin

sites.google.com/site/dorrrose/home

Stephen teaches in sustainable landscape planning, aesthetics, and visualization in the Faculty of Forestry and Landscape Architecture program at UBC. He received a BA/MA in Agricultural and Forest Sciences at Oxford, a MSc. in Forestry at UBC, and a Ph.D. in Environmental Planning at UC. Berkeley. He directs the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning (CALP), an interdisciplinary research group using perception-testing and immersive/interactive visualization to support public awareness and collaborative planning on climate change and sustainability issues. He has over 30 years’ experience in environmental assessment and public participation internationally. He has written or co-written two books on visual simulation, and recently published "Visualizing Climate Change: A Guide to Visual Communication of Climate Change and Developing Local Solutions. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive guide to visual communication of climate change. Current research interests lie in perceptions of climate change and renewable energy, planning for low-carbon resilient communities and video games as a community engagement tool on climate change.

www.calp.forestry.ubc.ca

Equiterre cofounder and senior director Steven Guilbeault is an environmentalist who has focused on climate change since the early ‘90s. He worked for Greenpeace Canada and Greenpeace International for ten years, was senior advisor for Deloitte and Touche, and has contributed to such media outlets as the Métro newspaper, Radio-Canada, La Presse and Corporate Knights Magazine. 

Throughout his career, Steven, who co-chaired Climate Action Network International for five years, has attended many UN climate meetings – an experience that in 2009 served as the topic for his first book, Alerte! Le Québec à l'heure des changements climatiques.

He is a member (since 2009) of Quebec's Cercle des Phénix, an honorary society for environmentalists, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. French newspaper Le Monde has called him one of the world's top 50 players in sustainable development.

In 2012, the Université de Montréal awarded him its medal for lifetime achievement, a distinction shared by the likes of Christopher Reeve and Oliver Jones. In 2014, he published his second book, Le prochain virage, with co-author François Tanguay.

www.equiterre.org/en

Trinh Xuan Thuan is born in Hanoi, Vietnam. He studied at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and at Princeton University where he obtained a Ph.D in Astrophysics. Since 1976, he is a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Virginia and a research associate at the Institut d'Astrophysique in Paris, specializing in extragalactic astronomy. He has written more than a dozen books on Astrophysics and Cosmology for the general public, some of which have been best-sellers and translated into more than 20 languages. His work of popularization of science has been recognized by many international prizes, including the Kalinga Prize awarded by the UNESCO in 2009 and the Cino del Duca world prize awarded by the Insitut de France in 2012. His many books include The Secret Melody (Oxford University Press, 1995), Chaos and Harmony (Oxford Universy Press, 2000, The Quantum and the Lotus (written with Matthieu Ricard, Crown, 2001), The Cosmos and the Lotus (Albin Michel, 2011), Desire of Infinity (Fayard 2013) and Facing the Universe (Autrement, 2014).   

Photo Credit : Bruno Klein

english.trinhxuanthuan.fr/

After 15 years in Finance, Yannick Roudaut has decided to involve himself in sustainable solutions. He is the founder of two companies: Alternité and La Mer Salée editions.

www.alternite.com