Prof Karl Klingsheim is a Director at www.Moonwalk.me, overseeing operations in Africa, and Adjunct Professor with www.NTNU.edu at the intersection of NTNU’s Strategic Research Areas Sustainability and Oceans. He recently served as Science & Technology Counsellor with the Royal Norwegian Embassy in South Africa.

He has previously held positions in industry, public institutions and governmental organizations, and he has extensive experience from applied and industrial research. He is a Registered Technology Transfer Professional (RTTP) and a seasoned educator with tenure as professor in Norway and in Poland. He has served as executive officer and board member for multinational companies as well as for university spin-offs. He has been instrumental in the concept development, formation, fundraising, business development, staffing, marketing, sales, operations, and benefit extraction for a large number of initiatives, programs, and start-up companies worldwide. (www.linkedin.com/in/karl-klingsheim)

Prof Linda Godfrey is a Principal Scientist at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and Associate Professor at Northwest University in South Africa, and holds a PhD in Engineering from the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

With over 20-years of sector experience, she currently heads up the Waste Research Development and Innovation (RDI) Roadmap Implementation Unit on behalf of the Department of Science and Innovation, a unit tasked with implementing South Africa’s 10-year Waste RDI Roadmap. She has provided strategic input to a number of local, regional and international waste and circular economy initiatives for the United Nations, European Union, South African Government Departments, Academy of Sciences, International Solid Waste Association, universities and businesses. She lectures internationally on solid waste management in developing countries, including the social, economic and environmental opportunities of “waste” within a circular economy context. She has published extensively in the field.

Dr Tony Ribbink is an internationally recognised scientist who applies his expertise in the service of the people of South Africa and Africa as a whole. He has leveraged science and technology to enable the people of different countries to work in concert to achieve African-defined and African-driven visions.

He also anticipated by many years the human rights issues current today by, for instance, initiating in the late 1970s the development of the Lake Malawi National Park in which villages were able to maintain their traditional rights.

In November 2007, Dr Ribbink became a founding trustee and CEO of Sustainable Seas Trust. From 1999 to 2005 he managed two international WWF projects on freshwaters, and concurrently, from 2002 to 2007, developed, raised the funds for and managed the African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme (ACEP). Dr Ribbink also received a gold medal from WWF for contributions to conservation and education and a silver medal for limnological research, an award only present four times since the society’s inception in 1964.

Dr Denise Hardesty is a principal research scientist for CSIRO’s Oceans and Atmosphere. A broadly trained ecologist, her work has taken her to all seven continents, studying everything from penguins in Antarctica to hornbills in West Africa, the rainforests of central and South America, and looking at plastic waste along the coastlines in Australia, Asia, North and South America and Africa.

For the last decade her work has increasingly focused on plastic pollution, looking at impacts on wildlife such as seabirds, turtles and marine mammals, and examining the sources, drivers and distribution of mis-managed waste.

As recognition of the plastic pollution issue grows, Denise is increasingly asked to provide expert opinion on marine debris related matters to international and domestic governments, industry, fisheries and other stakeholders including the United Nations, G7 and G20 bodies, and the Convention on Biological Diversity, with the aim of to reducing this important transboundary issue. She believes strongly in the contribution of communities, having worked with more than 8,000 citizen scientists over the last few years to help tackle the plastic pollution problem.