Imran Habib Ahmad has over fourteen years of diverse professional experience in the area of environment, climate change, sustainable development and public policy in the Asia-Pacific region. He has worked in government, civil society, academia, private sector and the international system. He is an international expert and a resource person in the area of global governance issues—climate change and multilateral environmental negotiations. He was involved as a lead negotiator from Pakistan in the climate change negotiations and elected as an Asian expert on UNFCCC expert bodies on Technology Transfer and National Communications. He is also a writer for Earth Negotiations Bulletin.

Tariq Banuri is the director of the Division for Sustainable Development/CSD Secretariat. He has broad experience on the interface between policy, research, and practical actions on the realization of the goal of sustainable development. He has worked in government, academia, civil society, and the international system. Before joining the United Nations, he was Senior Fellow and Director of the Future Sustainability Program at the Stockholm Environment Institute.

Chantal Line Carpentier joined the Division for Sustainable Development of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs as a Sustainable Development Offer in the fall of 2007. She previously served as Head of the Trade and Environment Program of the NAFTA Commission for Environmental Cooperation and worked at the Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture and the International Food Policy Research Institute as well as consulting for the UNDP, World Bank, and OCDE. She regularly publishes journal articles and book chapters on the relations between economics, trade and environment.

Piergiuseppe Fortunato is at the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations and has been contributing to the WESS since April 2006. Previously he has been an assistant professor in Economics at the University of Bologna and a research fellow at Equipe de Recherche en Economie Quantitative (EUREQua) of the Université Pantheon-Sorbonne (Paris). He has been doing extensive research on economic development, international trade and political economy publishing his papers on various international journals.

Alex Izurieta is a Senior Economic Affairs Officer in the Development Policy and Analysis Division of UN/DESA, and he contributes to the two flagship publications of the Division. His area of expertise is the analysis of global economic developments and the evaluation of policy scenarios with the help of macro-economic and global models. Prior to his current post at the UN, Alex Izurieta worked as a senior researcher at the University of Cambridge. Other work experiences include research work at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, New York, on the US economy and on monetary union systems, and research on finance and macroeconomics in developing countries at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. He has published in those institutions and various international journals.

Alex Julca has a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research. Having previously taught in Peru, the City University of New York, and as researcher at Columbia University, he has been working at the UN for the past ten years, half of them for the Development Policy and Analysis Division (DPAD). He has made substantive contributions to the WESS since 2004, and currently works on the chapter on adaptation strategies in developing countries. He has also published on international migration, remittances, and 'natural' disasters.

Jan McAlpine is the Director of the UN Forum on Forests Secretariat since November 2008. She has a long experience in international forest policy, initiatives and negotiations and has been part of the UNFF and its predecessor informal IPF and IFF processes for 15 years. Over the years she helped shape important actions, decisions and resolutions within and outside the UN system.

Oliver Paddison has been part of the WESS team since August 2006. He previously spent several years working for the United Nations ECLAC in Trinidad and Tobago and for the UNECA in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He has published papers in various journals, including the Journal of Development Studies, the Journal of Macroeconomics and the Journal of Economic Theory, and has a Ph.D. in Economics from the Catholic University in Louvain, Belgium.

Mariangela Parra has been part of the WESS team since December 2007. Before joining the Development Policy and Analysis Division as economic affairs officer she worked as inter-regional advisor for DESA’s Under Secretary General in New York, and for ECLAC’s Executive Secretary in Santiago. She has published papers on economic development and international trade, with a particular emphasis on patterns of specialization and terms of trade. Currently she is writing her dissertation to finalize a Ph.D. (ABD) in Economics at the New School University in New York.

Rob Vos joined the United Nations in 2005 as Director of DPAD. Before joining the UN, he was a Professor at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, and at the Free University Amsterdam. He has also worked as a senior economist at the Inter-American Development Bank where he co-founded the Inter-American Institute for Social Development (INDES). His academic and advisory work covers a broad range of development issues, including trade policy, inequality and poverty; financing for development; poverty and social policy analysis; and macroeconomic and general equilibrium modeling for development policy.

Richard Kozul-Wright received his Ph.D. in Economics from Cambridge University, from where he joined the United Nations, first in New York working on the World Economic and Social Survey and, subsequently, at UNCTAD in Geneva, where he has worked on the World Investment Report, the Trade and Development Report and the Economic Development in Africa Report. He has published articles and books on a broad range of issues related to economic development and economic history.