Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christina Dornack has been Director of the Institute of Waste and Circular Economy at the Technische Universität Dresden since January 2015. Her scientific work focuses on material flow analyses, waste and recycling management and mineral waste. She also conducts research on residue-related bioeconomics, the nexus between water, waste and soil, and international waste management strategies. She is a qualified engineer and Honorary Chair of the Research Advisory Council (RAC) of the German Biomass Research Centre (DBFZ). In addition, she chairs the Scientific Advisory Council of the State Association for Recycling Management in Saxony. She is also a member of the Environmental Scientific Advisory Council of the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) and of the Board of Trustees of the Membership Association of the German Waste Management Industry (EdDE).

Prof. Dr. Claudia Hornberg is a biologist, ecologist and medical specialist for hygiene and environmental medicine. Since 2002 she has been Head of the Environment and Health Working Group of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Bielefeld University. In 2018 she was appointed founding Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Bielefeld University, where she heads Working Group 1 on Sustainable Environmental Health Sciences. Her main research areas are public health, toxicology and environmental justice. She works on issues of basic science in these fields as well as on applied research and practice in environmental medicine, with a particular focus on population-related/preventive environmental medicine. Prof. Hornberg has been Chair of the SRU since 2016.

Prof. Dr. Claudia Kemfert is Professor of Energy Economics and Energy Policy at Leuphana University Lüneburg and Head of the Department of Energy, Transport, Environment at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin). As an economic expert in the fields of energy research and climate protection, she investigates issues of energy economics and develops scenarios for future energy supply. Prof. Kemfert advises various research institutions and Federal and State Ministries. She has been a member of the German Advisory Council on the Environment (SRU) since 2016 and Deputy Chair since 2020. She is a leading researcher who has received numerous awards for her work, a sought-after expert in politics and the media, and the author of a number of books. Most recently, she received the 2020 Award for Thought Leadership from portfolio institutionell.

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Köck has been Professor of Environmental Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Leipzig since 2001, and Head of the Department of Environmental and Planning Law at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ  in Leipzig from 2004 to 2014. His research fields include European and national environmental law, with a particular focus on legislation relating to water, nature conservation, immission control and hazardous substances. In the field of planning law, he is mainly concerned with regional planning, urban land use planning and infrastructure planning. In addition, he has been working for many years on legal issues relating to energy and the environment and agriculture and the environment. Prof. Köck is a member of the Publishing Board of the Zeitschrift für Umweltrecht (Journal of Environmental Law, ZUR) and since 2003 also joint managing editor. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal for European Environmental and Planning Law (JEEPL) and of the Management Board of the European Environmental Law Forum (EELF). From 2016 to 2019 he was chairman of the Scientific Council of the UFZ.

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Lucht is an earth system scientist and sustainability researcher with an interest in systemic and strategic issues. He is Co-Chair of the Department of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and holds the Alexander von Humboldt Chair in Sustainability Science at the Institute of Geography of the Humboldt University of Berlin. He is a graduate in physics and was trained in the USA in the application of Earth system observation programmes. His work focuses on the biosphere, land use, climate change and strategies for sustainability in a national and international context. He is co-author and lead author of reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has been appointed several times to the National Committee for Global Change Research and the German Research Foundation's German Committee Future Earth (DKN-Future Earth).

Prof. Dr. Josef Settele is an Associate Professor at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and a biodiversity researcher specialising in the protection and evolutionary biology of insects as well as biodiversity and land use. At the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ he heads the Department of Conservation Biology. Prof. Settele is a member of numerous bodies concerned with the issues of land use, the climate and the protection of biodiversity and heads major research projects in these fields. For example, from 2004 to 2009 he coordinated ALARM, the largest EU project to date on terrestrial biodiversity research. From 2010 to 2014 he was Coordinating Lead Author at the IPCC. From 2016 to 2019 he was Co-Chair of the Global Assessment of the World Biodiversity Council IPBES. He has been a member of the German Advisory Council on the Environment since 2020.

Prof Dr Annette Elisabeth Töller is a political scientist and has been Chair of policy research and environmental politics at the FernUniversität in Hagen since 2009. In her research, she deals with horizontal questions of environmental politics in Germany and Europe, such as the representation of interests in environmental policy and the right of environmental organisations to take legal action. She has also published on numerous substantial environmental topics, such as fracking, air pollution control, the circular economy, the bioeconomy and wind energy expansion. She has been responsible for various third-party-funded research projects and is the head of the interdisciplinary environmental sciences Master programme ‘infernum’. She was a member of the University Council of the FernUniversität from 2013 to 2020 and a member of the International Advisory Board of the Wuppertal Institute from 2022 to 2024. She has been a member of the German Advisory Council on the Environment since 2020.