Richard is the City Treasurer for Glasgow, having political accountability for the budget of Glasgow City Council. Glasgow has committed to delivering a Green New Deal as part of its targets for being net zero and climate resilient by 2030.

In addition, he is the Convenor for the Strathclyde Pension Fund, a £26 billion fund looking after the interest of 170 different employers, with 250 000 members. Over the last two years the fund has been overseeing work to develop a strategy to divest from fossil fuel investments, and has been working with other municipal pension funds like New York.

Between 2017 and 2019 he served as a Deputy City Convener for Education and Skills and he was the Convenor for Education Skills and Early Years until 2020, both at Glasgow City Council. Prior to this he was a Managing Director and has in-depth experience in medium to large businesses. He was also the Director of The Pearce Institute, a non-profit organization management company.

Brigid was elected to and served on the Austin city council from 1993 to 1996 where she championed consumer, electoral, and environmental reforms. She has been an advisor to the LCRA, Seton Hospital, and the City of Austin. Her carbon-reduction work won the TCEQ Environmental Excellence award in 2010. In 2014 she was elected to the Travis County Commissioners Court.

Currently, Shea is the USA Board Chair of ICLEI, Local Governments for Sustainability, and Chair of Air Quality subcommittee of the NACo EELU Committee. Shea serves on the national board of Clean Water Action, is a member of the state board of Texas Campaign for the Environment, and is a former member of the Austin Chamber of Commerce Clean Energy Council. She was selected for the 2019 Women in Government Leadership Program of Governing magazine, and was also recently given a Lifetime Achievement award by the Texas Energy Summit.

Prior to this she was an award-winning journalist at NPR stations in Minnesota and Philadelphia. She was a leader in the Save Our Springs movement of 1992 which resulted in Austin’s historic SOS law to save Barton Springs.

Nada Yamout is a risk management and audit specialist in the banking sector with more of 15 years’ experience and holds a Doctorate degree in Business Administration from Grenoble Ecole de Management, France. She acted as an elected member of the City Council of Beirut (2010-2016) and chaired the Finance & Budget Municipal Committee where she set a policy to preserve the City financial reserves in accordance with its Strategic and business plans.

She was actively involved in the UN-ISDR world campaign “My city is getting ready” for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and City Resilience. She was also nominated by the Arab Town Organization (ATO) to represent the Arab Local Authorities in the activities planned for the “Third World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction” (WCDRR) and in the inter-governmental preparatory Committee meetings (Geneva 2014).

She organized a scoping and risk assessment mission with Global Earthquake Model (GEM) and achieved a City Partnership with the World Bank both in the aim to develop and implement a “Comprehensive Urban Resilience Master Plan” (CURMP) for the City of Beirut (Beirut 2015).

Isabella de Roldão (PDT) is the first woman elected to occupy the post of vice mayor of Recife. She is a lawyer, teacher, student of nutrition and political leadership by vocation. She was President of the Democratic Labor Party of Recife (PDT) and of the Action of the Woman Labor (AMT).

Between 2013 and 2016, she served as a councilor at the Recife City Council. From February 2019 to April 2020, she commanded the Housing Secretariat of Recife, implementing the concept of habitability in city residences, through programs such as Pertencer – Living Space, Self-Construction and Partnership in her House. In the Vice-City Hall, she is the Strategic Coordinator of Projects, Partnerships and Exchanges in the area of International Relations.

Always committed to inserting the city on globally relevant agendas, she also works integrated with the departments of management in projects aimed at education and early childhood, youth protagonism, sustainability, urban mobility and female empowerment.

Mayor Abby Binay is now in her second term as chief executive of the the Philippines’ financial centre and premier investment hub, Makati, having been re-elected in the May 2019 elections. Prior to getting elected as Mayor of Makati in 2016, she served three terms in Congress from 2007 to 2016 as Representative of the second district of Makati.

During her first term in office, the mayor jumpstarted the city’s digital transformation through a series of public-private partnership (PPP)-led initiatives, including the Makatizen Card, Makatizen App, and the Makati Public Wi-Fi System. These have been recognized by national and international bodies advocating sustainable, green and inclusive development. Mayor Binay also made history when she entered into a ground-breaking joint venture agreement with a consortium of private companies for the construction of the Makati Subway, the first and most ambitious underground railway project undertaken by a local government unit in the Philippines.

Mayor Binay holds a bachelor’s degree in Human Ecology, major in Human Settlements and Planning, from the University of the Philippines in Los Baños, Laguna. She obtained her juris doctorate degree from the Ateneo School of Law and passed the bar in 2002.

Gareth Morgan is the Director of Resilience in the City of Cape Town. He led the development of the first Cape Town Resilience Strategy, and held senior leadership positions in the portfolio responses of the City to both the recent regional drought and the COVID-19 pandemic. He is interested in complex systems thinking and is involved in building actions in response to a wide range of shocks and stresses relevant to Cape Town.

In the early part of his career he was a Member of Parliament in the National Assembly for nine years, serving predominantly on the Portfolio Committee of Environmental Affairs. His legislative interests included climate change, energy, water and the green economy.

He is an Archbishop Tutu Fellow and is a recipient of the Rhodes Scholarship, which took him to Oxford University where he read for a MA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics and a MSc in Environmental Change and Management. In 2020 he was a finalist in the Mail & Guardian’s Greening the Future Awards. In 2021 he was chosen to join the Aspen Fellowship programme.