Our Story

Professor Gail Whiteman is an expert on global risk arising from the systemic changes occurring in the natural environment, the founder of Arctic Basecamp and Hoffmann Impact Professor for Accelerating Action on Nature & Climate at the University of Exeter’s Business School (UK). Since 2012, she is the Professor-in-Residence at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.  She is a past member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Frontier Risk and was a scientific keynote speaker at WEF’s 2020 session at Davos “What’s at Stake: The Arctic” alongside panellists including Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin and Former US Vice President, Al Gore.  In 2023 she was also a panellist and speaker at the 2023 WEF session in Davos – Unpacking the Polar Crisis. Professor Whiteman is an experienced moderator at events including Reuters Impact in 2022 and the World Economic Forum in Davos. She is actively involved in building science-based targets collective business action, including those for a future low-carbon economy. Her research utilises organisation theory on information flows to analyse how a range of actors (companies, civil society, and local communities) make sense of ecological risk, and how these actors transform and build resilience across scales given environmental pressures and social inequities. She has over 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers, including in prestigious journals Nature, Nature Communication, and the Academy of Management Journal. Her PhD is from Queen’s University and her field work was conducted in the subarctic region of Canada.  She is regularly interviewed by the press and in 2023 launched a Reuters series – Arctic Warning alongside Reuters Editor-at-Large, Axel Threlfall.

Julienne C. Stroeve received a PhD in geography from the University of Colorado Boulder, in 1996, for her work in understanding Greenland climate variability. Afterwards she became a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) within the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at CU-Boulder. More recently she was a Professor at University College London and recently was awarded a Canada 150 Excellence Research Chair at the University of Manitoba. Her Arctic research interests are wide-ranging, and include sea ice forecasting at seasonal, decadal and longer term time-scales, climate change and impacts on native communities. She has participated in several field campaigns in Greenland and the Arctic Ocean, including the year-long German-led Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) expedition from 2019/2010. Efforts over the past decade have increasingly focused on trying to make sense of the rapid environmental changes being observed in the Arctic and what these changes will mean for the rest of the planet. She is part of Arctic Basecamp, an annual event during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Dr. Stroeve’s work has been featured in numerous magazines and news reports, radio talk shows, and TV documentaries. She has given keynote addresses around the world on Arctic climate issues and briefed former Vice President Al Gore and Congressional Staff. Dr. Stroeve has published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and contributed to several national and international reports on climate change.  Stroeve has been named by Clarivate Analytics as one of the most highly cited researchers several years in a row.

Dr. Lovro Valcic is a builder of Polar bear toys as the founder and former CEO of Bruncin Ltd, an agile and dynamic team of outstanding R&D experts, working closely with scientists from across the world to develop custom solutions, systems, and sensors to facilitate fieldwork and research in the Polar regions. Lovro currently serves as the Director of Operations and heads the Data & Development Team at Arctic Basecamp Foundation. His work is mostly focused on the sustainable scale-up of the foundation and on the development of impactful digital tools in the global climate risks space, aiming to inspire and accelerate global climate action.

Helen has wide-ranging experience in non-profit and public services sectors including health, arts, culture, and climate change communications. As well as attending the World Economic Forum at Davos three times with Arctic Basecamp a career highlight was shipping a Greenlandic iceberg to the heart of COP 26 in Glasgow.