Prof. Martin V. Melosi, Deptartment of History, University of Houston, USA
"Privatization of Water: The Worldwide Implications."

Martin V. Melosi is Distinguished University Professor of History and Director of the Center for Public History at the University of Houston. He has also served as Fulbright Chair in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark in 2000–2001. A specialist in urban and environmental history, he is the author or editor of twelve books and more than sixty articles and book chapters, including the award-winning The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (2000) and Effluent America: Cities, Industry, Energy, and the Environment (2001). He has been the president of the American Society for Environmental History, the National Council on Public History, and the Public Works Historical Society. In 2005, he was named recipient of the Esther Farfel Award, given by the University of Houston for career achievement in research, teaching, and service. Melosi is currently revising his biography of Thomas Edison, completing an abridged edition of The Sanitary City, and beginning a new study titled Atomic Age America.

Dr. José Esteban Castro, School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology,
 University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK
“Water and citizenship: long-term structural social change in sociological perspective."

José Esteban Castro is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. A sociologist by training, Dr. Castro has an interdisciplinary background, his main interests being critical social theory and research on social inequality and change and the interweaving of socio-political and environmental macro and micro processes. He has also done research on thehttp://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/j.e.castro/. interlinks between water control activities, state formation and the development of citizenship rights, the intertwining of the public and private spheres in the provision of public services (water and sanitation), the interaction between the different epistemic subjects producing knowledge about water, the institutions and processes involved in the governance and management of this resource, and ecological distribution conflicts. He has done work on a number of countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and Portugal. Some of his recent publications are: Water, Power, and Citizenship. Social Struggles in the Basin of Mexico, Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006; “Urban water and the politics of citizenship: the case of the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (1980s-1990s)”, Environment and Planning A, Vol. 36 #2, (2004), pp. 327-46; “Poverty and citizenship: sociological perspectives on water services and public-private participation”, in Geoforum, Special Issue on “‘Pro-poor’ water: past present and future scenarios” (forthcoming 2006). Updated information about his work is regularly posted at:

Adjunct professor Esko Kuusisto, Finnish Environment Institute, Helsinki, Finland 
"Adaptation to climate change in the water sector – will historical experience be valid in the future?"

Esko Kuusisto has over 30 years of experience from research on hydrology and water resources management. His main areas of interest have been flood forecasting, snow and ice, lakes and time series analysis of hydrological phenomena. Since the late 1980s, he has been involved in climate change research, both impact studies and more recently also adaptation issues. He has also been involved with development projects in e.g. Vietnam, Ethiopia, China and Cambodia.

Dr. Kuusisto has written or edited a number of books dealing with a variety of topics, from global change to the history of hydropower construction in Finland. He has also written over two hundred articles for magazines and newspapers, with the intent of making the results of science available to the general public. He is also an eager nature photographer.