Resilience

Zinta Zommers is Mercy Corps' Head of the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance. A Rhodes and Commonwealth Scholar, she has graduate degrees in Zoology and Development Studies from the University of Oxford. Zinta worked with United Nations' Secretary-General's Climate Change Support Team, during the negotiation of the Paris Agreement, with United Nations Environment and with the Food and Agriculture Organization. She has advised the United States' Government and the Government of Sierra Leone, and has worked with vulnerable communities in over 10 countries across Africa and Asia. She previously coedited the book, Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change, and is a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Keith Alverson has degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and East Asian Studies from Princeton University (1988) and a doctorate in Physical Oceanography from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (1995). He has over 150 publications including Past Global Changes and Their Significance for the Future (Elsevier, 2000). He is currently Secretary General of the IUGG Union Commission on Climatic and Environmental Change and elected at-large member of the International Association for Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences Executive Committee.