Seminar Series

Sieglinde Snapp is a Professor of Soils and Cropping Systems Ecology, Assoc. Director, Center for Global Change Earth Observations at Michigan State University, and Senior Advisor to Innovation Systems for the Drylands, ICRISAT. She is ‘Mother of the Mother and Baby Trial’, used in dozens of countries as a participatory action approach to improve research relevance. Through interdisciplinary, open-access science, her team has helped shape agricultural policy in Malawi, flagged declines in soil productivity, and identified overlooked forms of crop diversity for sustainable food systems: http://globalchangescience.org/eastafricanode. She is an Agronomy Fellow and a Soil Science Fellow, and received the ASA International Service Award.

Dr. Claudia Ituarte-Lima is research associate at IRES at UBC. She is also a researcher on international law at Stockholm Resilience Centre and affiliated senior researcher at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights. For more than 15 years, she has specialized in the human rights, biodiversity and climate law nexus both in theory and practice. Her focus is on law and policy for sustainability and social justice and the transformation of international law into new governance forms at national and community levels. Her methodology ranges from extensive fieldwork especially in Africa and Latin America, to studies examining the interactions of international regimes .Claudia provides expert advise to the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Environment.

Dr. Steel is Associate Professor in the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics in the School of Population and Public Health. His research focuses on values and science in the context of environmental and public health issues. Dr. Steel is also the author of Philosophy and the Precautionary Principle: Science, Evidence and Environmental Policy (2015 Cambridge University Press). Current research includes SSHRC funded projects on concepts of diversity their relevance to science and public engagement with health policy decisions.

Dr Tahia Devisscher has ten years of international experience working at the interface of environment and development. In her work, Tahia adopts systems thinking and interdisciplinarity to integrate traditional knowledge with scientific data, and assess possible climate adaptation strategies based on ecosystem management. Tahia has a PhD from the University of Oxford (UK), and is a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of British Columbia (Canada). Currently, she is investigating the extent to which urban forests increase social-ecological resilience to climate change, and improve the way in which urban residents relate to, benefit from, and engage with nature.