Rajarshi DasGupta is a Senior Policy Researcher in the Institute for Global Environmental Stratgies. He received his Ph.D. in Global Environmental Studies from Kyoto University, Japan. He has worked extensively with the mangrove communities in India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and the Philippines, and authored several research articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. He served as a Lead Author (LA) for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Asia-Pacific Regional Assessment Report and currently serving as the Lead Author for the IPBES assessment on Sustainable Use of Wild Species. His current research interest includes assessment and management of mangrove ecosystem services and their effective utilization for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction through proactive landscape planning. Shizuka Hashimoto is an Associate Professor at the Department of Ecosystem Studies, Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the University of Tokyo. He has more than ten years of experience in ecosystem services evaluation and scenario analysis. He is a member of the Science Council of Japan. At the international level, he contributed to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Global Assessment and the Asia-Pacific Regional Assessment as a Lead Author, and IPCC-IPBES Co-sponsored workshop report as a Scientific Steering Committee member. Since 2018, he has served as one of the Multidisciplinary Expert Panel members of IPBES and a co-chair of the Task Force on Scenarios and Models. Osamu Saito is a Principal policy researcher and an expert in the field of biodiversity and ecosystem services. He has been working on the interlinkages between ecological, human and social systems through sustainability science approaches. His research experiences include socio-ecological studies on the ecosystem services provided bytraditional rural production landscapes (Satoyama) in both Japan and other Asian countries. He worked for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS) as Academic Director from 2011 to 2020. He has been also actively promoting various activities for the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) as a lead author of both regional and global assessments.
