Berit Kristoffersen is a political geographer and PhD student at the Department of Political Science, University of Tromso, Norway. Her PhD research is on human and environmental security in Norway, in the context of the state and industry's strategies for petroleum development in Arctic territories. She is a research fellow in the research program The Potentials of and Limits to Climate Change Adaptation in Norway (PLAN) where she is also working on a project on values and climate change in Norway. Before starting a PhD she was involved in Norwegian organizations and social movements emerging in the post-Seattle globalization movement, and worked as a freelance writer and editor of several reports and book chapters for NGOs such as Forum for Environment and Development, Zero, Adbusters Norway, and Attac.

Dr Karen L. O'Brien is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo, Norway and chair of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) project of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). Her research focuses on climate change vulnerability and adaptation, on interactions between globalization and climate change, and on the role that values and worldviews play in responding to environmental change. She currently leads a large social-science based project on The Potentials of and Limits to Climate Change Adaptation in Norway (PLAN). She has recently published a book with Robin Leichenko on Environmental Change and Globalization: Double Exposures (2008) that received the 2008 AAG Meridian Book Award for the Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography. She was a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report and the Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. She is on the editorial board of Global Environmental Change, the Annals of the Association of American Geography, and Ecology and Society, and on the steering committee of the Comparative Research Program on Poverty (CROP), the Norwegian Global Change Committee, and Concerned Scientists-Norway.