Sarah Metcalfe is Professor of Earth and Environmental Dynamics at the University of Nottingham, UK.  She has published extensively on environmental change in Latin America, with a particular focus on Mexico.  Although primarily a palaeolimnologist, her approach is very much multi-proxy, including the use of historical and instrumental records to help to improve our understanding of recent change.

David Nash is Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Brighton, UK. He is widely known for his publications on the reconstruction of historical climate changes in southern Africa, as well as his broader research into the contemporary and Quaternary geomorphology of dryland regions including the Kalahari, Atacama and southern Europe. His research uses methods ranging from scanning electron microscopy and thin-section analysis to the interpretation of historical documents.