Prakash Kashwan is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Brandeis University, Massachusetts. His research and scholarship focuses on questions of power, inequality, and justice in the context of global environmental and climate change. He is the author of Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2017), Editor of Climate Justice in India (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and one of the Editors of the journal Environmental Politics. His next book, Power in Solidarity: Collective Political Capabilities for Justice-Embedded Climate & Renewable Energy Triumphs in California, New York, and Maine (Oxford University Press) is expected to be published in 2027. Kashwan is the co-founder of the Climate Justice Network, former Chair of the Environmental Studies Section (2023-2025) of the International Studies Association and serves as an editor for the journal Environmental Politics.

Dr. Yoshitaka Ota is the founder of Nippon Foundation 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.