Pamela Kershaw is the Deputy Director for Biodiversity Planning and Stewardship at the National Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment. Pamela holds a B.Tech Degree in Nature Conservation. She is currently responsible for the development and implementation of relevant national policies, legislation and related tools, strategies, programmes for conservation and management of ecosystems for South Africa including implementation of relevant international conventions. During her years at DFFE, Pamela has gained significant experience in environmental impact assessments, particularly relating to impacts to biodiversity and has in the last 6 years been facilitating the development of a national policy and guidelines on Biodiversity Offsets.

Jeff Manuel has been responsible for Biodiversity Information Management and Biodiversity Planning at the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) since 2014. Prior to this, he spent a decade mainstreaming biodiversity into environmental management and land-use planning in South Africa. During that time, he interned at an environmental consultancy, an NGO, worked in provincial government and SANBI, which provided him with a broad perspective of user needs and behavior with respect to biodiversity data and information. Through mainstreaming biodiversity he developed a passion for piloting new concepts and then scaling these to drive systemic change in environmental governance. This led him to becoming a policy advisor with SANBI in 2010 and he has worked at the Data-Science-Policy interface ever since. He has developed particular expertise and interests in Biodiversity Offsets, Systematic Conservation Planning, Spatial Analysis- and Prioritisation. He has also developed a reasonably good understanding of Enterprise Information Management. He is passionate about building more effective institutions and teams, through Culture Transformation and Change Leadership.

Marthán holds a BA LLB from the University of Cape Town and an LLM in Environmental Law from the University of Cape Town. Before joining the law reform directorate at Department of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment, he was a legal specialist (biodiversity and ecological infrastructure) at SANBI. He is particularly interested in biodiversity law and policy.

Mthobisi Nzimande is the Assistant Director: Biodiversity Planning and Implementation within the South African National Biodiversity Institute. He has 9 years of environmental management experience, as a EIA reviewer, environmental planning & municipal support at provincial scale and now biodiversity mainstreaming into environmental management processes at a national scale.