Seminar Videos

October 8, 2020: IRES Faculty Seminar with César Rodríguez-Garavito


Climate litigation based on human rights is proliferating around the world. From the Netherlands to Mexico, from Canada to South Africa to the Philippines, from the Arctic to the Amazon, from domestic to international courts, litigants are bringing legal challenges against governments and corporations to hold them accountable for massive human rights violations associated with global warming. This talk presents the first systematic study of the universe of rights-based climate litigation around the world. The talk discusses the origins and the emergent legal doctrines as well as the  impact and limitations of rights-based litigation in advancing climate action.    Read More

October 1, 2020: IRES Student Seminar with Anthony Persaud and Ilana Judah


October 1, 2020: IRES Student Seminar with Anthony Persaud and Ilana Judah Read More

September 24, 2020: IRES Faculty Seminar with Areef Abraham


Areef has worked for over three decades with underserved communities who struggle to pay their energy bills. This presentation will discuss how and why it all began, and the successes and pitfalls he experienced along the way. Areef’s learned experience speaks to the importance of working effectively at the interface of communities, governments and tradespeople to improve outcomes for all. Read More

September 17, 2020: IRES Faculty Roundtable with Milind Kandlikar, David Boyd, and Claire Kremen


In March and April of 2020 as COVID-19 lockdowns were put in place around the world, observers noticed a palpable change in environmental conditions. As economic activity and movement of people stalled environmental quality improved. For example, air quality in places with notoriously bad levels of pollution became a lot better, observations of animal and bird life went up, and emissions of carbon dropped. However, six months into the pandemic we seem to be back to where we were in early 2020. This panel will address what we have learnt from this episode, and whether it provides lessons for a longer term transition to improved environmental and human health protection, including: the relationship between emerging infectious diseases, wildlife trade and deforestation, and the importance of actions to prevent future pandemics; how the covid 19 reveals the many frailties of our food system; and the future implications of CoVID for air quality and climate change. Read More

September 10, 2020: IRES Awards Session with Kai Chan (First Seminar in Term 1)


Want to write an application that you’ll be proud of for an NSERC or SSHRC master’s or doctoral award? Nervous about crafting a research proposal that will make your application stand out? Join this Awards Info Session and kick-start the writing process with some great tips and direction for creating a successful application. Read More

February 13, 2020: IRES Student Seminar with Juan Diego Martinez and Andrea Byfuglien


February 13, 2020: IRES Student Seminar with Juan Diego Martinez and Andrea Byfuglien Read More

February 6, 2020: IRES Faculty Seminar with Mark Harris


On December 1, 2019, for the first time in history, Indigenous communities from across Australia danced in unison at the same time, dancing for Country, for ancestors and for healing. For the first time in over 150 years, Corroboree took place on Gundungurra Country (in south-eastern New South Wales). In this presentation I want to juxtapose this moment with the recent history of moves to achieve Reconciliation in Australia that began with the establishment of a Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in 1991 and was followed by the attempts to comprehend Australia’s history of forced removal of Aboriginal children from the 1900s through to the 1970s (dubbed the Stolen Generations). This presentation will consider this historical context and the question of whether Reconciliation is possible in a settler-colonial society such as Australia and what lessons (if any) might be drawn for non-Indigenous peoples seeking to achieve Reconciliation.  Read More

January 23, 2020: IRES Faculty Seminar with Lenore Newman


The global environmental impact of rising consumption of animal products presents serious environmental challenges. One alternative is cellular agriculture: the production of animal products in-vitro. Such “clean meat” technologies promise improvements in environmental metrics, animal welfare, and human health. This discussion highlights research into the potential impact of cellular agriculture on the dairy industry; though cellular dairy could offer significant ecological benefits, these could be countered by intensification of agricultural activity in equatorial regions for the production of feedstocks for cellular agriculture. Using the concept of telecoupling, an umbrella concept that refers to socioeconomic and environmental interactions over distances, this talk examines the policy landscape needed to prevent unequal distribution of the costs and benefits of alternatives to animal products. Read More

January 16, 2020: IRES Student Seminar with Bronwyn McIlroy-Young and Harold Eyster


January 16, 2020: IRES Student Seminar with Bronwyn McIlroy-Young and Harold Eyster Read More

January 9, 2020: IRES Faculty Seminar with Rashid Sumaila


The World Trade Organization (WTO) was tasked with eliminating overfishing fisheries subsidies way back in 2001. This is yet to be accomplished. To support the ongoing WTO negotiations, the Fisheries Economics Research Unit at UBC has been providing fisheries subsidies data and analysis to the global community since the early 2000s.  Dr. Rashid Sumaila will present his latest findings and describe the state of play in the struggle to discipline harmful subsidies. Read More

November 21, 2019: IRES Faculty Seminar with Wendy Jepson


Dr. Wendy Jepson holds a University Professorship in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University where she has been on faculty since receiving her Ph.D. in Geography from UCLA in 2003. Since 2016, Dr. Jepson has been a Visiting Professor at the Federal University of Ceará, Fortaleza (Brazil). Her research addresses contemporary debates in political ecology, human-environment interactions, and water security and governance. Read More

November 12, 2019: IRES Faculty Seminar with Matthew Schnurr


Matthew Schnurr is Associate Professor in the Department of International Development Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He received his PhD from the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia in 2008. His research interests lie primarily in agricultural development, environmental justice and farmer decision-making. His new book entitled Africa’s Gene Revolution: Genetically Modified Crops and the Future of African Agriculture will be published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2019. Read More

November 7, 2019: IRES Student Seminar with David Righter and Livia Mello


November 7, 2019: IRES Student Seminar with David Righter and Livia Mello Read More

October 31, 2019: IRES Student Seminar with Vikas Menghwani and Maayan Kreitzman


October 31, 2019: IRES Student Seminar with Vikas Menghwani and Maayan Kreitzman. Read More

October 17, 2019: IRES Faculty Seminar with Sieglinde Snapp


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. Read More

October 10, 2019: IRES Student Seminar with Evan Bowness and Abhishek Kar


October 10, 2019: IRES Student Seminar with Evan Bowness and Abhishek Kar. Read More

October 3, 2019: IRES Faculty Seminar with Claudia Ituarte-Lima


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. Read More

September 19, 2019: IRES Faculty Seminar with Daniel Steel


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. Read More

September 12, 2019: IRES Faculty Seminar with Claire Kremen


Claire Kremen will discuss why conservation in working lands is needed to complement and enhance the effectiveness of protected areas, describe several agricultural case studies where working lands conservation appears successful, and discuss meta-analysis results, barriers to adoption and potential solutions through community engagement. Read More

September 5, 2019: IRES Faculty Seminar with Tahia Devisscher


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. Read More