Will Steffen,^* Åsa Persson,^** Lisa Deutsch,^*** Jan Zalasiewicz,^**** Mark Williams,^***** Katherine Richardson,^****** Carole Crumley,^******* Paul Crutzen,^******** Carl Folke,^********* Line Gordon,^********** Mario Molina,^*********** Veerabhadran Ramanathan,^************ Johan Rockström,^{*************} Marten Scheffer,^{**************} Hans Joachim Schellnhuber,^{***************} Uno Svedin<sup>****************


*</sup>Will Steffen () is Executive Director of the ANU Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, and serves on the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee (MPCCC) and as a Climate Commissioner. He is also Co-Director of the Canberra Urban and Regional Futures (CURF) initiative, a joint venture of ANU and the University of Canberra. From 1998 to mid-2004, Steffen served as Executive Director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, based in Stockholm, Sweden. His research interests span a broad range within the fields of climate and Earth System science, with an emphasis on incorporation of human processes in Earth System modelling and analysis; and on sustainability and climate change, with a focus on urban systems. Address: The ANU Climate Change Institute, The College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University, Coombs Building, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. Address: Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. e-mail: will.steffen@anu.edu.au
^**Åsa Persson is a Researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, Sweden. With a background in human geography, she now specializes in global environmental governance, in particular governance of and financial mechanisms for climate adaptation. Address: Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. Address: Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.
^***Lisa Deutsch is Senior Lecturer, Director of Studies and Programme Director Sustainable Enterprising at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Her research examines the couplings between the ecological effects of globalization of food production systems and national policy and economic accounts. She particularly focuses on the implications of trade for freshwater and coastal ecosystem functioning relative to intensive livestock and aquaculture production systems. Her work contributes to the development of a set of complementary tools that can be used in economic accounting at national and international scales that address ecosystem support and performance. She is also an Adjunct Fellow of the Australian National University within the Fenner School of Environment & Society. Her most recent publication: Deutsch, L, Troell, M, Limburg, L and Huitric, M. 2011. Global trade of fisheries products-implications for marine ecosystems and their services. In Köllner, T, editor. Ecosystem Services and Global Trade of Natural Resources: Ecology, Economics and Policies. Routledge, London, UK, 304 pp. Address: Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.
^****Jan Zalasiewicz is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Geology of the University of Leicester, and formerly was a field geologist and biostratigrapher at the British Geological Survey. He is a member (formerly Chair) of the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, is Chair of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, vice-Chair of the International Subcommission on Stratigraphic Classification and Secretary of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy. Broadly interested in Earth evolution and the deep time context of current anthropogenic change, his book The Earth After Us explores the geological record of humankind, while the Planet in a Pebble explains palaeoenvironmental analysis and The Goldilocks Planet (with Mark Williams, forthcoming) is a geological history of Earth's climate. Address: Department of Geology, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK.
^*****Mark Williams is a Reader in Geology at the Department of Geology of the University of Leicester, and formerly was a geologist working for the British Geological Survey and British Antarctic Survey. He is a member of the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, is Secretary of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, and a former vice-president of the Palaeontographical Society. A strong advocate of using the geological record of climate change to inform present anthropogenic-driven climate change, he edited the book Deep time perspectives on climate change and is co-author (with Jan Zalasiewicz) of the forthcoming book The Goldilocks Planet, a geological history of Earth's climate. Address: Department of Geology, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK.
^******Katherine Richardson is a professor of biological oceanography and Leader of the Sustainability Science Center at the University of Copenhagen. She chaired the Danish Commission on Climate Change Policy that presented a plan for removing fossil fuels from the country's energy system. Address: Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate Biological Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
^*******Carole Crumley is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (emer.), Senior Social Scientist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University (Sweden), and Research Director of the IHOPE project. She holds a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (USA), an M.A. in archaeology from the University of Calgary (Alberta, Canada), and a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (USA). Address: Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.
^********Paul Crutzen born in 1933 in Amsterdam, he was trained as a civil engineer. In 1959, he joined Stockholm University to study meteorology. His research has been especially concerned with atmospheric ozone. Thereby he identified the importance of nitrogen oxides. He served as Director of Research at the National Center of Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, 1977–1980, and thereafter—until his retirement—(1980–2000) at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz. In 1995, he received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on atmospheric ozone. Address: Max-Planck-Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany.
^*********Carl Folke is Professor in natural resource management, Science Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University and Director of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His research is on the role that living systems at different scales play in social and economic development and how to govern and manage for resilience in integrated social-ecological systems. Address: Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. Address: Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden.
^**********Line Gordon is a researcher at Stockholm Resilience Centre. She holds a PhD in Natural Resources Management, from Department of Systems Ecology at Stockholm University. She works with interactions among freshwater resources, agricultural production and ecosystem services with a particular focus on resilience, development and global change. Address: Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.
^***********Mario Molina holds a Chemical Engineer degree (1965) from UNAM (Mexico), and a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry (1972) from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the President of the Mario Molina Center in Mexico City, Professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and was formerly an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He serves on the U.S. President's Committee of Advisors in Science and Technology. In the 1970s he drew attention to the threat to the ozone layer from industrial chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases that were being used as propellants in spray cans, refrigerants, solvents, etc. More recently, he has been involved with the chemistry of air pollution of the lower atmosphere, and with the science and policy of climate change. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, and of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of the Vatican. He has received more than thirty honorary degrees, as well as numerous awards for his scientific work including the Tyler Prize in 1983, the UNEP-Sasakawa Award in 1999, and the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Address: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
^************Veerabhadran Ramanathan is a Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He currently chairs an international science team from Asia, Africa and Latin America under the Atmospheric Brown Clouds Program sponsored by the United Nations Environmental Programme. In the 1970s, he discovered the greenhouse effect of CFCs and numerous other manmade trace gases and forecasted in 1980, along with R. Madden that the global warming would be detectable by the year 2000. He, along with Paul Crutzen, led an international team that first discovered the widespread Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABCs). He showed that ABCs led to large scale dimming, decreased monsoon rainfall and rice harvest in India and played a dominant role in melting of the Himalayan glaciers. His team developed unmanned aerial vehicles with miniaturized instruments to measure black carbon in soot over S Asia and to track pollution from Beijing during the Olympics. He has estimated that reduction of black carbon can reduce global warming significantly and is following this up with a climate mitigation Project Surya which will reduce soot emissions from bio-fuel cooking in rural India. He chaired a National Academy report that calls for a major restructuring of the Climate Change Science Program and it was received favorably by the Obama administration. Address: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA.
^{*************}Johan Rockström is a Professor in natural resource management at Stockholm University, and the Executive Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Stockholm Resilience Centre. He is an internationally recognized systems researcher on global sustainability issues, and a leading scientist on integrated land and water resource management, with a particular focus on resilience and development. He has more than 15 years experience from applied water research in tropical regions, and has more than 100 research publications in fields of agricultural water management, watershed hydrology, global water resources, eco-hydrology, resilience and global sustainability. He serves on several scientific committees and boards, e.g., as the vicechair of the science advisory board of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact research (PIK) and he chairs the visioning process on global environmental change of ICSU, the International Council for Science. He was awarded the title “Swede of the Year” in 2009 for his work on bridging science on climate change to policy and society. Address: Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. Address: Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.
^{**************}Marten Scheffer is interested in unravelling the mechanisms that determine the stability and resilience of complex systems. Although much of his work has focused on the ecosystems of lakes, he also worked with a range of scientists from other disciplines to address issues of stability and shifts in natural and social systems. Scheffer is a member of the science board of the Resilience Alliance, a group of ecologists, economists, and specialists in organisational dynamics, politics, and sociology aiming at developing a innovative research on resilient society-nature interactions. In addition Scheffer has served on various Science Boards such as the ones of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics and the IGBP program GLOBEC The last years, Scheffer has been active in setting up two institutes for interdisciplinary research: IPL and the South American Institute for Resilience and Sustainability Science (SARAS). Both institutes and Scheffer's vision on stimulating interdisciplinary top-science have been highlighted in Nature magazine (451: 872–873). Address: Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands.
^{***************}Hans Joachim Schellnhuber has been the Director of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) since he founded the institute in 1991. He is Professor for Theoretical Physics at Potsdam University, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Chairman of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU). He is a member of numerous national and international panels for scientific strategies and policy advice on environment and development matters and elected member of the Max Planck Society, the German National Academy (Leopoldina), the US National Academy of Sciences, the Leibniz-Sozietät, the Geological Society of London, and the International Research Society Sigma Xi. He authored and co-authored about 250 articles and more than 50 books in the fields of condensed matter physics, complex systems dynamics, climate change research, Earth System analysis, and sustainability science. Address: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany.
^{****************}Uno Svedin is a Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and former Director of International Affairs at the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (Formas). He has a Ph.D. in Physics from Stockholm University and has been a Scholar in the Swedish Secretariat of Future Studies. His field of interest lies in the interface between science and policy. The scientific part deals with a complex of issues related to systems understanding of environmental challenges and sustainable development, specifically the interconnections between natural science and social science/humanities (risk studies, governance studies, cultural and “human dimensions” including environmental ethics). The policy part of his field of interest focuses on how scientifically generated information connects to policy advice functions in an interactive way (system of knowledge production). He has published a number of books and articles on environmental issues, future studies, sustainable development and research policy. Before taking on the position as Director of International Affairs at Formas, he was the Director of Research at the Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research (FRN). He has also worked as Professor in Water and Environmental Studies at the University of Linköping. Address: Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.