Bek has shaped her career around enabling impact from science, facilitating successful collaborations, and influencing change. She has worked in ecosystem research, policy and communication across university, NGO, and government sectors, including leadership of major national initiatives in collaborative research infrastructure. Bek’s main focus at NRM Regions Australia is enabling the collation and development of knowledge to support the delivery of nature-based solutions for disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation by the NRM Regions. A key part of this is facilitating connections and a community of practice across the NRM regions to share evidence, knowledge, and best practices. Bek is passionate about developing people, and building bridges between groups of people to enable collective impact for our planet and communities. Alongside her work with NRM Regions Australia, she works as a leadership coach and facilitator for a range of clients in the water and environment sectors. She’s previously served on several Boards and advisory committees in the environment and STEM sectors, is a past President of the Ecological Society of Australia, and remains actively involved in the Society’s policy engagement work.

Sarah is an experienced landscape architect and interdisciplinary designer working on contextual and place based solutions to broader environmental and societal issues. Sarah’s current research at the Faculty of Architecture, Building, and Planning, at Melbourne University foregrounds subjective experience, emotion, and perspective as both a methodological approach to understanding issues and events, and as a method of communication. Whilst she brings global perspective and experience, having lived and worked in the UK, France, and Ireland, Sarah’s current research and practice is centred on her Green Wedge farm just beyond Melbourne’s urban growth boundary, and in her local peri-urban community. Her work embraces the ‘think global, act local’ mantra, focusing on contextual design responses that take account of local conditions including community needs and sentiment, place conditions, biodiversity, materials (including tree and plant species), and local practices. The highly specific and well adapted local response may better generate useful approaches elsewhere, than the generic.

Russ Wise is a sustainability economist passionate about working with people to help understand the challenges caused by rapid technological and environmental change and economic development and to develop approaches that enable learning and decision making under uncertainty.

Dr Morgain is an interdisciplinary environmental social researcher and practitioner whose research seeks to explore how cultural and social dynamics shape our connections within living systems. Since the 2019-2020 wildfires, she has worked with the NRM sector and First Nations practitioners on initiatives addressing resilience of landscapes and Country. Her research includes understanding how interlinked biodiversity and climate risks shape decision-making and investment pathways, including in the finance sector. She works with NRM Regions Australia on the nature-led climate resilience project.

Chris Lee is the CEO of Climate-KIC and Industry Professor within Institute for Sustainable Futures UTS. His keys areas of work include climate adaptation and risk, program design and management, systems innovation and design and the development of large collaboration models. Chris has over 30 years' experience across the research, not-for-profit, public, private and university sectors. During his time at Climate-KIC Australia, Chris has grown the team from one to 17 people, led a merger of Climate-KIC with UTS and co-convened influential system programs including Business Renewables Centre-Australia, Industry Energy Transitions Initiative and NSW Decarbonisation Hub. Prior to joining Climate-KIC Australia, he led the development and implementation of Climate Change Adaptation programs for NSW Government. Chris is an experienced leader, who has served on a number of NGO Boards as a Director and Chair. He is currently on the advisory Board of the University of Western Sydney Urban Transformations Centre, ISF’s Institute Board and the company secretary for Climate-KIC.

I am a conservation ecologist and have been researching ways to solve conservation problems since 2016. I am driven by my passion for finding solutions to complex ecological problems that balance human needs, and seeing them implemented on the ground. I completed my PhD in 2022 at the University of Queensland entitled “Assessing the state and planning for the conservation of intact ecosystems”. I then worked as a researcher at the University of Queensland, and then the Queensland University of Technology, before commencing my position as a Lecturer at the University of Newcastle in 2025. I have a strong research background in ecological restoration, and my research currently focusses on improving forest-based carbon and biodiversity markets by combining my previously developed products with these tools and assessments.