Swapan Mehra is the Chief Executive Officer of Iora Ecological Solutions Pvt. Ltd. and is a global leader in climate action and ecosystem conservation. His pioneered work on finance, technology and governance-led interventions in community forestry has been lauded at forums such as the MIT Climate Co-lab, Norway REDD exchange and the UNFCCC COP. He has led international carbon finance teams at AES, Evolution Markets and EcoSecurities and has leveraged over $10 billion of public and $75 million in private environmental finance. His tech-led work on conserving 10 million hectares of forests is shaping national strategies and policies in India. Swapan is an advisor to the Government of India on several initiatives including the setting up of new domestic environmental markets. He served on the Expert Advisory Group of the Voluntary Carbon Market Integrity Initiative, The Green Credit Programme of India and the Independent International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits. He recently completed a Mid Career MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School and is currently spearheading the setting up a new Nature investment fund focused on South Asia.

Gaurav Mehta is the Founder and CEO of Dharma Life. Dharma Life is a social enterprise working to improve the quality of life in rural India through a women entrepreneurship model that provides low-income households and individuals at the last mile with livelihoods, awareness and access to socially impactful products and services. Since 2009, DL has created 17,000+ DLEs (more than 70% women) and has impacted 14m+ beneficiaries across 50’000 villages in 14 states of India through its interventions, which are aligned to the UN SDGs with a focus on the four areas: energy access and climate change, gender equality, health & hygiene, and livelihood & digital education.

Previously, Gaurav spent three years in the private equity space at General Atlantic, a large growth capital investment firm (until 2008). He focused his efforts on opportunities in the consumer and media, and healthcare sectors across Europe. He also initiated and led General Atlantic’s clean energy efforts in Europe. Prior to General Atlantic, he has worked at Morgan Stanley in London in the investment banking division, where he specialized in European capital products and healthcare investment banking. Gaurav graduated with a BA Hons degree in International Business Studies and French from the European Business School, London. He also has an MBA from London Business School.

Philip Meissner is Founder and Director of the European Center for Digital Competitiveness, which aims to inspire public debate on the opportunities of digital technologies for solving big societal challenges such as the climate crisis and demographic change. The center also develops solutions for these challenges focusing on the areas of artificial intelligence, green tech and digital democracy.

In addition, Meissner is Chair of Strategic Management and Decision Making at ESCP Business School in Berlin. His research combines the fields of strategy, technology and psychology to create new approaches for AI-based decision-making in organizations.

He regularly gives key notes on artificial intelligence, decision-making and digital transformation, advises companies on future technologies, and is a sought-after expert in national and international media. He was recognized among the 40 under 40 by Capital and the Young Global Leaders by the World Economic Forum.

Souad Mekhennet is an award winning reporter for The Washington Post’s national security desk and author.
She worked previously for The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, and NPR.
Mekhennet was a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and is a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies as well as the Geneva Center for Security Policy and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
She first reported for The Post in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, delving into the backgrounds of the Hamburg cell and writing on the al-Qaeda threat in Europe, North Africa and the Gulf. She was part of The Post’s coverage of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. From 2004 until 2013 Mekhennet worked at The New York Times where she produced some of the most distinguished reporting on the Bush administration’s war on terrorism and "Inside the world of Jihad."
In 2014 she returned to The Post as a contributor and was upped to staff writer in 2017.
Mekhennet has written four books, most recently her critically acclaimed memoir, "I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad", which the New Yorker described as “an enthralling and sometimes shocking blend of reportage and memoir from the centers of jihadi networks.”
It was included in the 2017 long list for The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, received the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism, in 2018 she received the Henri Nannen journalism award and the "Boerne Preis" one of the highest literature awards in Germany.

James is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Ghana Business School, and a fellow at the Penn Institute for Urban Research, University of Pennsylvania, USA. He also served as the Resilient Advisor to the former Mayor of Accra from 2017 to 2020, where he led the city in the development of the Accra Resilient Strategy. One of the initiatives in the Strategy – engaging informal waste collectors in the waste management chain, won the C40 Cities Bloomberg Philanthropies Award in 2019. His research focuses on the development of local economies to improve the quality of life of residents in local and rural communities, and urban informality in its multiple dimensions ― economy, settlements, livelihood, waste, and trade. He has been involved in the development of government policies in Ghana – National Local Economic Development Policy, and National Decentralisation Policy and Strategy. Dr Mensah is a graduate of the National Institute for Development Administration, Thailand, and the University of Ghana.

Former: journalist, TV presenter, author and documentary film maker; host of live current affairs interview shows for 10 years on independent news channel ATV and public broadcaster MTV in Budapest, Hungary. Until 2006, worked for the BBC in London, in news, current affairs and documentaries, primarily on the strand Panorama. Experience in investigative journalism, video journalism, war reporting and filming in hostile environments. Continued making documentaries for the BBC on a freelance basis while anchoring flagship TV shows in Hungary. Currently, Executive Director, UNICEF Hungary. Author of a book on migration from Eastern Europe to the European Union (2006).

Recognized for her career as an educator and entrepreneur, Cindy Mi is the Founder and CEO of VIPKid, a global edtech company that connects children in China with the world’s best teachers for real-time online English language learning. VIPKid has become China’s market-leading edtech startup. VIPKid’s vision is to build a global classroom that empowers students and teachers through personalized learning, connects cultures across the world and sparks a passion for lifelong learning. There are approximately 180,000 classes every day on the VIPKid platform.

VIPKid has been awarded several high-profile honors such as Fast Company’s World Most Innovative Companies 2018 and 2019 and Flexjobs’ #1 global company for remote jobs.

VIPKid has received investment from Tencent, Sequoia Capital, Sinovation Ventures, Coatue Management, Learn Capital and Kobe Bryant’s firm, Bryant Stibel, among others.

Cindy has spoken on the main stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, ASU+GSV Summit (2019, 2018 and 2017), OZY Fest in Central Park, Y Combinator’s Startup School at Tsinghua University in Beijing and Y Combinator's Global Founders Summit (2018 and 2017) in San Francisco, among others.

In 2018, Cindy joined the Whittle School & Studios’ Academic Advisory Board. Cindy was also selected to join the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders Class of 2018.
Cindy earned her MBA from CKGSB, China’s leading private business school, and studied at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management as part of an MBA exchange program.

Mr. Miao Yanliang joined CICC in March 2023. Before that he has served for 10 years at China State Administration of Foreign Exchange, including as its Chief Economist since May 2018. He joined in 2013 as Senior Advisor to the Administrator and then Head of Research. He helped formulate global macro views and built a top-notch research platform for the world’s largest reserve manager. As Chief Economist, he also advises the senior management of PBC/SAFE on a range of economic and policy issues. Before SAFE, he was an economist with the IMF where he worked on emerging markets and then the euro area crisis including as policy coordinator for the Portugal program. Before the IMF, he was visiting the Bank of Israel in 2007 as special assistant to the Governor and taught economics at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University. Mr. Miao is an adjunct professor of Peking University’s National School of Development, a member of China Finance 40 Forum, a trustee of Shanghai University and an external member of the Academic Committee of China Development Bank. He publishes extensively on global macro and occasionally as a columnist for Project Syndicate. He holds a Ph.D., an M.A., an M.P.A., all from Princeton University, and an M.A. in economics from Fudan University.

Denis Minev is CEO of Bemol, a top retailer in northern Brazil. He is also a Co-Founder and Member of the Board of Fundação Amazonas Sustentável, an NGO that promotes development and conservation in poor communities of the Brazilian Amazon. In 2012, he was nominated a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Between 2007 and 2009, Minev served as State Secretary for Planning and Economic Development of Amazonas and was previously an analyst at Goldman Sachs. He holds a BA in Economics and an MA in Latin American Studies from Stanford University and an MBA from the Wharton School.

Rebeca is Founder & CEO of Clarity, which tries to solve the problem of inefficient and unequal allocation of capital by developing a universal framework and building an automated tool to rate companies and organizations. Previously, she was leading the Global Digital Transformation Program at Santander Bank (one of the largest banks in the World). Rebeca was Founder & CEO of Blink Booking, the award winning last minute hotel booking mobile app leader in Europe, with more than 800,000 downloads, almost 3,000 hotels. Blink was acquired by Groupon less than 1 and a half years after launching. After the acquisition, Rebeca worked at Groupon as General Manager and Senior Director of Product and Operation, leading one of the top priorities of the company.

She is advisor at several startups with focus on social impact.

Prior to Blink, Rebeca worked at Bain Capital Private Equity, Boston Consult ing Group and as engineer at the German Aerospace Agency, Siemens and IBM. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, MSc in Telecommunication Engineering for Polytechnic University in Madrid and Stuttgart University (all of them with Distinction).

Ambarish Mitra is a serial entrepreneur and investor in AI, AR, Food tech and Genomics. Ambarish is the Founder of Blippar, a leading technology company specializing in augmented reality, artificial intelligence and computer vision. Under Mitra’s direction, Blippar has grown from a groundbreaking idea to an industry leader with offices in the UK, US and India and was listed 3 years in a row in CNBC’s list of most disruptive companies in the world.

Ambarish is also the co-Founder of Greyparrot, an AI / Deep Learning startup focused on waste management and recycling using computer vision to sort waste at scale and fulfil many of key SDGs- UN sustainable development goals. Ambarish started his tech career in 1997 as a high school drop-out teenager creating a web portal towards women empowerment.

With a vision to bridge the physical and digital worlds and give people more from the world they see through AR and Computer Vision, Ambarish has been widely recognized for his pioneering work in the field of Augmented Reality. Mitra was named by Ernst & Young as UK Entrepreneur of the Year for 2016, and was appointed as an Ambassador for the GREAT Britain campaign to promote British innovation around the world. Mitra was also recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2017. He was also announced at Technology Pioneer by WEF in 2021 for Greyparrot.

Ambarish has given many keynotes on pioneering innovations and entrepreneurship at esteemed institutes and events including, TED Talk, World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting, Web Summit, Mobile World Congress, CES, DLD, SXSW, Recode Media, TechCrunch Disrupt, GMIC China, Harvard Business School and Oxford University, inspiring many young entrepreneurs, students, and business community with his talks.

Co-founder of Code Green, a Tech Non-Profit Organization disrupting traditional fundraising models to accelerate social & climate solutions, by helping a growing Web3 community of artists, communities and collectors, to harness the power of technology to help heal the Earth and fight for radical green justice.

Activist & UNCCD Ambassador & a strong global figure for Social, Gender & Climate Justice, advocating for the Great Green Wall for the past 5 years.