Nelson grew up on a dairy farm in the South Burnett, went to Canberra and the wider world. He has been involved in Commonwealth administration, Commonwealth-State relations, global change and environmental research, farming industry organisations, landcare organisations, work for UNEP, aid assignments, and representation at IMO and OECD. He was a member of the first IPCC and a Special Adviser to the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research. He received the Centenary Medal ‘for service to the environment and conservation through Landcare’. His current interests are biosecurity issues, land management law and policy, global change responses, agriculture and climate change, natural flood plain management, land and sea stewardship and the biodiversity decline problem.

Since 1988, Peter has been an Associate Professor in the School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability at the University of Queensland. He has managed agricultural and forestry production and integrated natural resource management projects for 50 years in 8 countries, working closely with Government Departments, private industry, and International Development Agencies. This led to community-based forestry/agroforestry inputs to production systems by farmers and showing National Agricultural Research Organisations how they could support this. Research on agricultural microbiology led to the development of commercial microbial inoculants (e.g., rhizobia for crop and tree legumes used commercially in Australia, India, Thailand, and Philippines), and other bacteria for biological control of plant diseases of sorghum, maize, sweet corn. The HayRite (Bacillus amyloliquefaciens) strain H57, was developed as a commercial product for control of mould and mycotoxin production in hay and silage, and sold in Australia, Brazil and Argentina. Through Royal Society of Queensland initiatives, other major involvements continue to be in rangelands management and supporting farmers whose land integrity, water resources and property rights are threatened (assaulted) by coal and gas mining, fracking, and waste-water management

Dr Philippa England is an Adjunct Academic at Griffith University where she taught and researched in the areas of Planning and Environmental laws across three decades. Her current research interests include native vegetation laws, urban and regional planning and distributed energy resources. She currently works part time for Solar Citizens, a not-for-profit organisation campaigning to increase access to consumer energy resources.