Richard A Houghton is Deputy Director and Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, MA, USA. The Center is an independent, nonprofit institute focused on environmental science, education and policy. Houghton has studied the role of terrestrial ecosystems in the global carbon cycle and climate change for nearly 30 years, in particular documenting changes in land use and determining the sources and sinks of carbon-attributable land management. He has participated in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessments on Climate Change. He received his PhD in ecology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, NY, USA in 1979 and has worked as a research scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, NY, USA, and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, USA. He has been at the Woods Hole Research Center since 1987, serving as Acting Director in 2009 and serving for 2 years (1993–1994) as a visiting senior scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, USA.Shobhakar Dhakal is one of the two Executive Directors of the Global Carbon Project – an international scientific program dedicated to the better understanding of the carbon cycle and its management. His areas of research are the quantification and modeling of the direct and indirect energy and carbon flows in urban areas, low carbon city scenarios, cities’ energy, and climate-mitigation policy analyses and cross-comparative case studies. He has authored and edited several scholarly publications including books, reports, journal special issues, journal articles and others. Dhakal is serving as one of the coordinating lead authors of the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC for the Working Group III. He is also currently one of the lead authors of the Global Energy Assessment and a member of the Consensus Panel on Low Carbon Cities of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa. Dhakal recently served as a member of the Cities Energy Modeling Group convened by the International Energy Agency, and as an international expert to the Taskforce on Urban Development and Energy Efficiency of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development.