Mark Sippola is the Chief of the Cap-and-Trade Program at the California Air Resources Board (CARB) responsible for leading teams that cover auctions, allowance allocation, market monitoring and oversight, the compliance offset program, registry development and maintenance, and program linkage. His duties include collaboration with other governments exploring cost-effective carbon pricing mechanisms. He joined the California Cap-and-Trade Program in 2013 and has over a decade of experience working on its design and implementation, including close involvement in the formal public processes to amend the Cap-and-Trade Program in 2016 and 2018. Prior to working at CARB, he conducted research on airflow and pollutant exposure at two U.S. Department of Energy national labs. Mark has a doctoral degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from The Ohio State University, and he is a licensed chemical engineer.
Javier Martinez heads the Mitigation Department of the Ministry of the Environment of Panama. He is an environmental engineer from the Universidad Tecnológica de Panama. Currently, he is leading a team of excellent professionals in charge of the GHG inventories at different levels (national, subnational, and corporate), the carbon market, and decarbonization policies. Secretary of the interinstitutional committee on distributed generation. Former national GHG inventory coordinator and decarbonization agenda coordinator. Before joining the Ministry, in 2021, he worked with the REDD+ project in Panama. He believes that carbon markets have an essential role in fighting climate change.