Prof. Trisia Farrelly is the Co-Coordinator of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty with over 350 members from more than 60 countries. She has been involved in the global plastics treaty negotiations since 2018 as a member of the United Nations Environment Programme’s Expert Group and then Scientific Advisory Committee (Marine Litter and Microplastics). Trisia is a Senior Editor of Cambridge Prisms: Plastics and her co-edited book is Plastic Legacies: Pollution, Persistence, and Politics. Trisia provides science-policy advice on the global plastics treaty as Technical Advisor to Secretariat for the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) countries. In 2021, she was nominated NZ Women of Influence Awards (Environment) finalist, and in 2023, she received the WasteMINZ Award for Excellence (Product Stewardship). Trisia has also been awarded two Massey University medals for Exceptional Research Citizenship and Excellence in Teaching.

Rufino Varea is a PhD scholar at the University of the South Pacific and an Indigenous Rotuman scientist researching marine ecotoxicology. He is a recipient of the Pacific-European Union Marine Partnership (PEUMP) Research Grant and has a publishing background in the natural sciences and social sciences. He is also an alumnus of the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) Blue Charter under the Commonwealth Marine Plastics Research & Innovation Framework and the ACU-British Council Commonwealth Futures Climate Research Cohort, where he represented Oceania at the Conference of Parties (COP 26 & 27).

Dr. Yoshitaka Ota is the founder of Ocean Nexus, a scholarly network of ocean researchers who devoted their research to advance ocean equity. Dr. Ota believes that all ocean policy and intervention shall be ‘anti-inequity’, explicitly designed and implemented to eliminate systemic issues, such as racism, colonial legacy and gender discrimination through ocean governance. This conceptual core is stemmed from a mount of evidence that Ocean Nexus offers by the research and further the network find that any conservation and sustainability effort for ocean environment ultimately fails to deliver the outputs without addressing social equity as the outcome.

At the University of Rhode Island, Dr. Ota is a Professor of Marine Affairs. Dr. Ota graduated University College London with Ph.D. in Anthropology and worked in Universities and research institutes of UK, Japan, Canada and US as a researcher and professor. He has over 100 research publications, book chapters and reports. Dr. Ota has held the Professor of Practice position at the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs in University of Washington and have had various visiting and affiliate positions in US and Canada. He also has the Executive Masters of Public Administration from Evans Policy School in University of Washington.