Robert Paarlberg, Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, is an independent scholar and consultant specializing in global food and agricultural policy. He received his BA in government from Carleton College and his PhD in government from Harvard. Paarlberg has been a member of the Board of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the National Research Council and a consultant to the National Intelligence Council (NIC), USAID, COMESA, IFPRI, the World Bank, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2009 he presented testimony on U.S. agricultural development assistance policy to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. His 2008 book from Harvard University Press was titled Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept out of Africa. His 2013 book from Oxford University Press is titled Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know. His 2015 book from Oxford University Press is entitled The United States of Excess. His current research on policies to improve diets and reduce cardiovascular disease is supported by NIH.

Aldyen Donnelly is a co-founder and director of carbon economics at Nori, a carbon removal marketplace launched in 2018. At Nori, she leads the development of methodologies to establish Carbon Removal Certificates and recruits early CRC buyers and suppliers into the marketplace. A small-business developer and consultant for over 40 years, Donnelly started to work on market-driven strategies to reduce atmospheric carbon concentrations in the mid-1990s. Her projects include using emission-reduction credits to finance carbon sequestration in agricultural soils, a stationary fuel-cell application, and carbon-capture and storage projects, among others. Donnelly also co-authored Canadian province Nova Scotia’s 2009 GHG Emissions Regulations, the first of its kind in North America.