Volans, UK;
Professor Elkington is a world-renowned author, advisor, and entrepreneur who has advocated and promoted sustainability for more than four decades. He is Visiting Professor at the Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility, Cranfield School of Management, Imperial College, and University College London (UCL). Over the years, he has promoted sustainable development as an advisor to many governments, business, and civic institutions around the world. In 2008 he became the Co-founder and Chairman of Volans, a think tank and “future-focused business working at the intersection of sustainability, entrepreneurship and innovation”. One of his most significant contributions to the field of sustainability was the introduction of the triple bottom line in his 1997 book entitled Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business. The concept of the triple bottom line, which promotes the idea that business should balance economic pursuits with social and environmental outcomes, has by now become a gold standard within the field of sustainability. Notably, it has been used as the benchmark for the development of global initiatives such as The UN Global Compact, the Global Reporting Initiative, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, Michigan State University, USA;
Jianguo “Jack” Liu is a world leader in systems integration and sustainability (e.g., integrating ecology with social sciences, policy, and technologies for understanding and promoting global sustainability). He holds the Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability, and is University Distinguished Professor and founding director of Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at Michigan State University (USA). He has translated many research findings to effective policy and management for global sustainability, especially in China. Furthermore, he has amplified the impacts through helping numerous others. Liu’s pioneering research has opened up new frontiers in sustainability and greatly advanced the fundamental understanding of global challenges. He coined the integrated concept of telecoupling (socioeconomic-environmental interactions over distances), and has been leading the development and applications of the award-winning telecoupling framework. This framework helps disentangle the complexity of globalization and systematically expand sustainability science from focus on specific places separately to human-nature interactions across distant places. It provides a powerful tool to uncover hidden impacts of human activities within specific places on sustainability elsewhere. Many of his research findings have been translated into effective policies and management interventions, which have helped the recovery of a global wildlife icon (giant pandas), improved management of protected areas, and revolution of China’s environmental protection.