Prof.Tony Allan
Tony Allan is an internationally esteemed expert in water resources and the political economy of water policy and its reform. A pioneer in the development of key concepts in the understanding and communication of water issues and how they are linked to agriculture, climate change, economics and politics, he was named the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate in March 2008. While now retired from teaching, he continues to be an active researcher and supervisor of research students in the framework of the School of Oriental and African Studies / King’s College London Water Issues Group which he founded.

Dr Carole Dalin
Carole Dalin is a postdoctoral researcher in the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change & the Environment, at the London School of Economics in the UK. She holds a PhD in Environmental Engineering & Water Resources from Princeton University, and a Master of Science from Ecole Centrale Paris in France.

Within the Climate Adaptation & Natural Resources team at Grantham, Carole currently focuses on water security in southern Africa. Her doctoral work explored several aspects of water resources embodied in food trade. With collaborators, she calculated and analysed the evolution of the global virtual trade network, modelled international virtual water flows, and projected trade-offs between food & water security in China. She combines hydrological and economic modelling tools to assess water saving options at different scales, in particular via trade of agricultural products.

Prof Wilco Hazeleger
Wilco Hazeleger serves as director of the Netherlands eScience Center, a centre that connects ICT (big data, computational science) with applications in scientific domains. In addition he is professor in Climate Dynamics at Wageningen University and is affiliated to KNMI, the Dutch national meteorological service.

At Wageningen University and Reading University, he studied meteorology. Wilco received his PhD in 1999 in physical oceanography from Utrecht University, after which he went to Columbia University in New York to conduct research on decadal climate variability. In 2002 Wilco started working at KNMI on climate dynamics, climate extremes, sea level scenarios and development of global Earth system models. From 2006 to 2014 Wilco led several climate research divisions at KNMI.

Wilco’s climate and sea level scenario work is directed toward climate adaptation issues. Wilco initiated and led the EC-Earth project, a European Earth System modelling that develops a state-of-the-art earth system model based on numerical weather prediction model of ECMWF. Wilco has authored and (co-)authored over 90 refereed publications on climate variability, extremes, predictability, climate change and adaptation to climate change. Wilco serves on a number of international and national science committees and is involved in a large number of national and European climate science projects.

Professor Sonia Seneviratne
Sonia Seneviratne is leader of the land-climate dynamics group, in the Institute for Atmospheric & Climate Science at ETH Zurich. Her main area of interest is the role of soil moisture & vegetation for the energy & water cycles.

She holds a PhD in environmental sciences from ETH Zurich (2002), and was a visiting scientist at MIT and NASA/GSFC before returning to ETH in 2005. She has published more than 60 peer-reviewed articles in the field of land-climate interactions, including publications in Nature, PNAS, Nature Geoscience and Nature Climate Change. Her research group investigates the role of land-climate interactions using model experiments and observations.

Sonia was Coordinating Lead Author of the IPCC Special Report on "Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation" (2009-2012), and has been involved in or led several national and international research projects. In 2013 she was awarded the 2013 James B. Macelwane Medal at the AGU Fall Meeting Honors Ceremony, held in December 2013 in San Francisco. The medal is for “significant contributions to the geophysical sciences by an outstanding early career scientist.”

Dr Henny van Lanen
Henny van Lanen is Associate Professor in the Hydrology & Quantitative Water Management Group at Wageningen University & Research centre. He is coordinator of the European Drought Centre (EDC), member of the Open Panel of CHy Experts (OPACHE) of Commission of Hydrology (CHy) from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), member of the Discussion Group on Droughts of the UN-International Strategy on Disaster Reduction (UN-ISDR), Coordinator of the European FRIEND programme (EURO-FRIEND, Flow Regimes from International Experimental and Network Data; cross-cutting theme UNESCO-IHP), Global Coordinator of the FRIEND Inter-Group Coordination Committee (FIGCC) (cross-cutting theme UNESCO-IHP), Project Review Group of Global Water Partnership (WM-GWP) on Integrated Drought Management in Central and Eastern Europe (CEEIDMP). He was editor of the textbook “Hydrological Drought”. He wrote two XEROCHORE (An Exercise to Assess Research Needs and Policy Choices in Areas of Drought) Science Policy Briefs (on Characterization of Water Bodies and Monitoring) and currently as project coordinator strongly involved in Science-Policy Interfacing at different scales (from river basin to pan-Europe).