EYE ON EARTH SUMMIT - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Researcher in the Areas of Geoinformatics
Dr. Gilberto C mara (born 1956) is a researcher in the areas of Geoinformatics, Spatial Databases, and Environmental Modelling. He is General Director of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) for the period 2010 to 2013, on a second four-year mandate, and is internationally known for defending free access for geospatial data and software. C mara set up the open access policy for the images from the CBERS China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellites and for the maps for measuring deforestation in Amazonia. He led the development of SPRING, a free GIS that innovated in the use of object-oriented modelling for spatial data, and of TerraLib, an open source GIS library for large environmental databases. He is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Earth Science Informatics and Computers, Environment and Urban System, and is a professor in INPE's graduate programs in Earth System Science and Computer Science. He has published several books and more than 150 papers in conferences and journals, that have been cited more than 4200 times (Google Scholar - September 2010).
Job Titles:
- Research Associate in Ethnobotanical Conservation at the Botanical Museum of Harvard University
Dr. Plotkin has served as Research Associate in Ethnobotanical Conservation at the Botanical Museum of Harvard University; Director of Plant Conservation at the World Wildlife Fund; Vice President of Conservation International; and Research Associate at the Department of Botany of the Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Plotkin is now President of the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), a nonprofit organization he co-founded with his fellow conservationist, Liliana Madrigal in 1996.
Job Titles:
- Leading American Oceanographer and Former Chief Scientist
Sylvia A. Earle (born 1935) is a leading American oceanographer and former chief scientist. Earle is a devout advocate of public education regarding the importance of the oceans as an essential environmental habitat.
Sylvia A. Earle is a former chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a leading American oceanographer. She was among the first underwater explorers to make use of modern self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA) gear, and identified many new species of marine life. With her former husband, Graham Hawkes, Earle designed and built a submersible craft that could dive to unprecedented depths of 3,000 feet.
Sylvia Alice (Reade) Earle was born in Gibbstown, New Jersey on August 30, 1935, the daughter of Lewis Reade and Alice Freas (Richie) Earle. Both parents had an affinity for the outdoors and encouraged her love of nature after the family moved to the west coast of Florida. As Earle explained to Scientific American, "I wasn't shown frogs with the attitude 'yuk,' but rather my mother would show my brothers and me how beautiful they are and how fascinating it was to look at their gorgeous golden eyes." However, Earle pointed out, while her parents totally supported her interest in biology, they also wanted her to get her teaching credentials and learn to type, "just in case."
She enrolled at Florida State University and received her Bachelor of Science degree in the spring of 1955. That fall she entered the graduate programme at Duke University and obtained her master's degree in botany the following year. The Gulf of Mexico became a natural laboratory for Earle's work. Her master's dissertation, a detailed study of algae in the Gulf, is a project she still follows. She has collected more than 20,000 samples. "When I began making collections in the Gulf, it was a very different body of water than it is now - the habitats have changed. So I have a very interesting baseline," she noted in Scientific American.
In 1966, Earle received her Ph.D. from Duke University and immediately accepted a position as resident director of the Cape Haze Marine Laboratories in Sarasota, Florida. The following year, she moved to Massachusetts to accept dual roles as research scholar at the Radcliffe Institute and research fellow at the Farlow Herbarium, Harvard University, where she was named researcher in 1975. Earle moved to San Francisco in 1976 to become a research biologist at and curator of the California Academy of Sciences. That same year, she also was named a fellow in botany at the Natural History Museum, University of California, Berkeley.
Although her academic career could have kept her totally involved, her first love was the sea and the life within it. In 1970, Earle and four other oceanographers lived in an underwater chamber for fourteen days as part of the government-funded Tektite II Project, designed to study undersea habitats. Fortunately, technology played a major role in Earle's future. A self-contained underwater breathing apparatus had been developed in part by Jacques Cousteau as recently as 1943, and refined during the time Earle was involved in her scholarly research. SCUBA equipment was not only a boon to recreational divers, but it also dramatically changed the study of marine biology. Earle was one of the first researchers to don a mask and oxygen tank and observe the various forms of plant and animal habitats beneath the sea, identifying many new species of each. She called her discovery of undersea dunes off the Bahama Islands "a simple Lewis and Clark kind of observation." But, she said in Scientific American, "the presence of dunes was a significant insight into the formation of the area."
Though Earle set the unbelievable record of freely diving to a depth of 1,250 feet, there were serious depth limitations to SCUBA diving. To study deep-sea marine life would require the assistance of a submersible craft that could dive far deeper. Earle and her former husband, British-born engineer Graham Hawkes, founded Deep Ocean Technology, Inc., and Deep Ocean Engineering, Inc., in 1981, to design and build submersibles. Using a paper napkin, Earle and Hawkes rough-sketched the design for a submersible they called Deep Rover, which would serve as a viable tool for biologists. "In those days we were dreaming of going to thirty-five thousand feet," she told Discover magazine. "The idea has always been that scientists couldn't be trusted to drive a submersible by themselves because they'd get so involved in their work they'd run into things." Deep Rover was built and continues to operate as a mid-water machine in ocean depths ranging 3,000 feet.
In 1990, Earle was named the first woman to serve as chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency that conducts underwater research, manages fisheries, and monitors marine spills. She left the position after eighteen months because she felt that she could accomplish more working independently of the government.
Earle, who has logged more than 6,000 hours under water, is the first to decry America's lack of research money being spent on deep-sea studies, noting that of the world's five deep-sea manned submersibles (those capable of diving to 20,000 feet or more), the U.S. has only one, the Sea Cliff. "That's like having one jeep for all of North America," she said in Scientific American. In 1993, Earle worked with a team of Japanese scientists to develop the equipment to send first a remote, then a manned submersible to 36,000 feet. "They have money from their government," she told Scientific American. "They do what we do not: they really make a substantial commitment to ocean technology and science." Earle also plans to lead the $10 million deep ocean engineering project, Ocean Everest, that would take her to a similar depth.
In addition to publishing numerous scientific papers on marine life, Earle is a devout advocate of public education regarding the importance of the oceans as an essential environmental habitat. She is currently the president and chief executive officer of Deep Ocean Technology and Deep Ocean Engineering in Oakland, California, as well as the coauthor of Exploring the Deep Frontier: The Adventure of Man in the Sea and sole author of Sea Change: A Message of the Ocean, published in 1995.
Job Titles:
- Deputy Director of the United Nations
- Deputy Director UN - ISDR, Switzerland
Helena Molin-Valdés is currently the Deputy Director of the United Nations - International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) Secretariat in Geneva, where she has co-ordinated a number of projects and tasks. She is also co-ordinating the Making Cities Resilient campaign 2010-2011. She was a key person from UNISDR in the development and negotiation of the Hyogo Framework for Action 2004-2005, she co-ordinated editing and production team of the publication Living with Risk: A global review of disaster reduction initiatives (2001-2004) and was initially involved in developing the UNISDR-WB partnership in the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery. She has worked actively in regional networking for disaster risk reduction, with advocacy, on gender issues, and was the senior policy advisor to ISDR in charge of the sustainable development linkages and Inter-Agency coordination.
An architect by training, with a master degree in development planning, Helena joined the United Nations in 1992, when she set up the regional unit for Latin America and the Caribbean of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction in Costa Rica. She also worked for the Pan-American Health Organization on disaster mitigation in health facilities. Before that, she worked for several years heading a Swedish development NGO focusing on local and municipality strengthening, local building practices and social development projects in Nicaragua, after practicing architecture in Swedish private sector.
Mott MacDonald is a global management, engineering and development consultancy with more than 14,000 staff, AED 6 billion revenue and work in 140 countries for the public and private sectors.
Job Titles:
- Department Head of the International Renewable Energy Agency "IRENA
Mr. Thani Al-Zeyoudi is the Department Head of the International Renewable Energy Agency "IRENA" within the UAE Ministry of Fore
Rick Fedrizzi was named President and CEO of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) in 2004, after a distinguished 25-year career at United Technologies subsidiary Carrier Corporation. He was elected chair of the World Green Building Council in October 2011. The World Green Building Council (WorldGBC) is a coalition of representing green building councils in 89 countries around the world.
Under his leadership at the USGBC, more than 100,000 residential and commercial buildings and communities in 129 countries are participating in USGBC's market-leading LEED green building program, and more than 170,000 individuals hold LEED Professional Credentials. Of its many programs, The Center for Green Schools at USGBC is Fedrizzi's passion, with its goal of every child being in a green school within this generation. He serves on numerous boards and advisory committees, including the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, and the American Architectural Foundation. He is chair of the Scaling Sustainable Buildings Action Network of the Clinton Global Initiative. Among his honors are the Charles H. Percy Award for Public Service from the Alliance to Save Energy, the prestigious Olmsted Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects, and the Arents Award from the Syracuse University.
William Jefferson Clinton was the first Democratic president in six decades to be elected twice - first in 1992 and then in 1996. Under his leadership, the country enjoyed the strongest economy in a generation and the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, including the creation of more than 22 million jobs.