Jothiganesh Sundaram (Jothi), is Regional Technical Lead on Climate and Weather-related risk and PRISM, at United Nations World Food Programme Regional Office for Asia-Pacific at Bangkok. At WFP, he focuses on strengthening capacity of Government systems in the Asia-Pacific region on climate risk analytics, impact-based forecasting, last mile climate services and climate informed decision making. He has more than 10 years of experience in implementing Climate Risk Management, Disaster Risk Reduction projects, in collaboration with several International, UN, and Government agencies.

Nguyen Thi Yen is the climate change and disaster reduction advisor of CARE International in Vietnam. She has approximately 20 years experience in areas of community-based disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, particularly in climate and disaster vulnerability and capacity analysis (CVCA), community resilience capacity building, resilient livelihood linked with nature-based solutions, and agro-climate information services targeting poor ethnic minority women.

Daniel is WFP’s social protection and cash adviser for Asia Pacific. He has over a decade of operational and analytical experience with WFP and other UN agencies, academia, think tanks, and development organizations in social protection, resilience, DRM and climate adaptation. He has previously worked on similar issues with the likes of German Development Cooperation, FCDO, FAO, UNICEF, Humanitarian Outcomes, and the Institute of Development Studies.

Laura is a shock responsive social protection specialist with over 22 years-experience, working across the nexus from complex protracted crisis and into development. Her programme and policy experience in LMIC across Africa, SE Asia and Central Asia has focused on socio economic vulnerability to shocks and included refugees, IDP’s and informal workers in urban and rural areas. Laura is at the forefront of global initiatives exploring the potential for leveraging and strengthening national social protection systems for shock response (also known as adaptive social protection).

Sudarno is an economist and the first director of The SMERU Research Institute. His current position as a policy adviser at the National Team for the Acceleration of Poverty Reduction (TNP2K), Office of the Vice President of the Republic of Indonesia shows his strong linkages to Indonesian policymakers. He holds a Ph.D. and an MA from Vanderbilt University, all in economics. He is a former head of the Statistic Society Forum in Indonesia and was a visiting fellow at the Southeast Asia Forum (SEAF) at Stanford University.