Prof. Supiandi Sabiham obtained his PhD Degree in Agricultural Sciences from Kyoto University, Japan in 1988 with a specialization in “Tropical Soil Science”.  He has been working as Professor at the Department of Soil Science and Land Resource, Faculty of Agriculture, Bogor Agricultural University (IPB), Indonesia, for more than 40 years.  He has conducted extensive research on sustainable peatland management supported by national and international research funds. He has published more than 50 scientific papers in national and international journals, including both individual as well as co-authored contributions. He has been serving as the President of the Peat Society of Indonesia (HGI) for the second period since 2016.

In 1993-1994 and between February-August 2009, Prof. Supiandi was invited by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University as Visiting Scholar to carry out research focused on Peatland Management Based on Ecosystem Unique. In the period between 2011 and 2013, he worked as one of the lead authors of the 2013 Supplement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines: Wetlands. Since 2012, he has been researcher and responsible counterpart of the research collaboration between IPB and The University of Gottingen. In January-February 2013, he was invited by the University of Gottingen as Visiting Professor to give a general lecture entitled “The History of Peat Deposits in Indonesia.” From April 2013 to March 2014, he was re-invited by the Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University to conduct teaching and research focused on Carbon Management in the Tropical Peatlands.

Prof. Chris Evans gained a PhD in Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, UK, and now works at the UK’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. He holds an honorary professorship at Bangor University, and a visiting professorship at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. He is a biogeochemist with over 20 years of experience in terrestrial and freshwater carbon cycling and greenhouse gas emissions, focusing in particular on peatland ecosystems. His UK-based research spans field measurement and monitoring of carbon and greenhouse gas fluxes, field and laboratory manipulation experiments, process modelling, the upscaling of process understanding to support national greenhouse gas emissions inventory reporting, and the use of Earth Observation methods to map and monitor peat condition. He advises several branches of the UK government on the impacts of land-management on peatland greenhouse gas emissions, was a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ‘Wetland Supplement’, and is also a lead author on the IPCC’s ongoing revision of the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use guidelines.

Prof. Chris has worked been working on tropical peatlands since 2007, studying the effects of land-use and management on aquatic and gaseous carbon losses, and is currently involved in a number of UK-funded projects aimed at reconciling agricultural and economic development with the protection of peatlands and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in Indonesia and Malaysia. He has published over 140 papers in peer-reviewed journals, and supervised over 20 PhDs and postdoctoral researchers.

Prof. Susan Page studied at the University of Nottingham for a BSc in Biological Sciences followed by a PhD in wetland ecology. She followed this with a lectureship at the University of Leicester where she now holds a personal chair in the Department of Geography. Between 2011 and 2015, she was the Head of Department.

For the last 20 years Professor Page’s research has focused on the ecology and carbon dynamics of tropical peatlands, with a main focus in Southeast Asia.  She has been a partner in European Union and UK research council funded research programmes involving collaborations with UK, European and Southeast Asian partners.   When Professor Page commenced her research studies, most tropical peatlands were still in a pristine, forested condition, but over the last two decades she has seen significant changes in land use, involving loss of peat swamp forest, drainage and conversion to agriculture as well as extensive damage by wildfires.  These events have provided Professor Page with a rapidly changing backdrop for her research activities that, in turn, have led to advisory roles to government bodies and NGOs, consultancy work and her appointment as a Lead Author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Her current research focuses on understanding the impacts of land use change and fire on peatland ecosystems and the opportunities for carbon loss and greenhouse gas emissions mitigation. She has authored more than 100 journal papers, books, book chapters and technical reports, and has supervised more than 20 PhD students.

She is the recipient of the Busk Medal 2013 awarded by the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers and the 2015 Theodore Sperry Award of the Society for Ecological Restoration for her conservation research on tropical peatlands.

Dr. Fahmuddin Agus earned his MSc and PhD degrees in Soil Science from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA in 1989 and 1993, respectively. His BS degree in 1983 was from Universitas Andalas, Padang, Indonesia. He is a research scientist at Indonesian Soil Research Institute, under the Indonesian Agency for Agricultural Research and Development, Ministry of Agriculture, Indonesia. His research focus is on climate change in relation to land use and land management systems. Most of his research in the last decade is conducted on peatland, on the subjects of sustainable peat management, peat subsidence and greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions.

He also serves as a member of the Task Force Bureau for the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the period of Assessment Report 6. At the national level, he is the coordinator of the Climate Change Consortium on issues related to agriculture.

In addition, he has served as the co-principal investigator of various international research collaborations on sustainable land management, including a study on ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation through Alternative Land Uses for Emissions Reduction in the Rain Forest of the Tropics’ in partnership with the James Hutton Institute in the UK, the World Agroforestry Center in Kenya, and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), in Bogor, Indonesia.

Prof. Dwi Astiani is a Tropical Peatland and Forest Ecology expert and Lecturer at the University of Tanjungpura, West Kalimantan, Indonesia. She serves as a Lecturer at the Department of Forestry & Agricultural Sciences since 2013 and has been a member of the Indonesian Peat Society since 2016. Prof. Dwi holds a PhD from Yale University in Tropical Peatland Forest Dynamics, Land use, and Carbon Flux. Her skills include peatland water management, fire and restoration; tropical forest and peatland carbon budget; climate change; sustainability; and environmental policy.

Prof. Dwi has been involved in numerous research projects, such as ex mining land restoration, assessing impact of forest degradation, carbon stocks assessment and dynamics in tropical peatland forest, West Kalimantan green growth and planning, emission and subsidence mitigation and fire reduction with water level setup on peatland.