October 27, 2016: IRES Faculty Seminar
Speaker: Michele Koppes

October 27, 2016: IRES Faculty Seminar
Speaker: Michele Koppes

IRES Seminar Series

Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (every Thursday)

Location: AERL Theatre (room 120), 2202 Main Mall

 

Can climate change move mountains?

Abstract:

Climate change is causing more than warmer oceans and erratic weather. It can also change the shape of the planet. Glaciers are a fundamental link between climate and the tectonic and surface processes that create topography. Mountain ranges worldwide have undergone large-scale modification due the erosive action of ice, yet the mechanisms that control the timing of this modification and the rate by which ice erodes remain poorly understood. We find a wide range of erosion rates from individual ice masses over varying timescales, suggesting that modern erosion rates exceed long-term averages by two to three orders of magnitude. We also see that glaciers in Patagonia erode 1000 times faster than they do in Antarctica today. These modern rates are likely due to the dynamic acceleration of these ice masses as air and ocean temperatures warmed and they retreated over the past few decades. The repercussions of this erosion add to the already complex effects of climate change in polar and high mountain regions. Shrinking and accelerating glaciers destabilize slopes upstream, increasing the risk of landslides, and deposit more sediment in downstream basins, potentially impacting fisheries, dams and access to clean freshwater in mountain communities. And the dramatic increase in modern erosion rates suggest that glaciers in the Canadian Arctic, one of the most rapidly warming regions in the world, are on the brink of a major shift that will see them speeding up and eroding faster as temperatures warm above 0ºC.

 

Bio:

Michele Koppes is an Assistant Professor in Geography at UBC, a Canada Research Chair in Landscapes of Climate Change, a faculty affiliate at IRES and a Senior TED Fellow. Her passion is forensic geomorphology: the art of reading landscapes to decipher the forces that shaped them.  Her particular expertise is in glaciers, and their impact in shaping mountains and polar regions at a variety of time scales, from last year to the last million years. Her research focus is two-fold: to determine the efficacy of glaciers as agents of erosion, and to determine the climatic and oceanic drivers of glaciations in high mountains and coastal settings. She has current field projects in high places all over the world, from BC to Patagonia, Alaska, the Himalayas, Greenland and Antarctica, where her team combines detailed field observations with numerical modeling of ice-ocean dynamics and glacier mass balance.

Michele Koppes is an Assistant Professor in UBC Department of Geography and is also a new Faculty Associate in IRES.

 

Seminar video unavailable due to technical issues.

 

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Photo credit: Dominic Sherony from flickr/Creative Commons

January 12, 2017: IRES Student Seminar
Speaker: Holly Andrews

IRES Seminar Series

Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (every Thursday)

Location: AERL Theatre (room 120), 2202 Main Mall

(Note: Sophia Murphy will not be presenting because she is sick.)

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Indigenous Erasure in BC’s Environmental Assessment Process

Abstract:

Due to changes in Canadian case law, there is a growing focus on making space for Indigenous rights and interests in BC’s environmental assessment process. However, despite this increased attention, First Nations are continuing to report that their interests are poorly represented in evaluations of project effects. This disconnect is the focus of my thesis research, and in this talk, I discuss findings from a review of fifteen EA certificate applications approved by the provincial government between 2011 and 2016. I found that evaluations of the extent and significance of potential impacts on Indigenous rights and interests are now central (and required) components of every EA. However, the methods most commonly used to carry out such analyses tend to rely on settler-colonial assumptions about culture and value that often invalidate or obscure issues of critical concern to First Nations. Moreover, this negation is so commonplace that my evaluation revealed a consistent set of precise mechanisms through which project proponents systematically exclude Indigenous interests in such applications. In my research, I refer to these patterns as “strategies of exclusion”, and for the purposes of this presentation, I will identify five of the most common and describe two.

Bio:

Holly Andrews

RES MA student

Holly Andrews is currently pursuing a master’s degree at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability under the supervision of Dr. Terre Satterfield and Dr. Michael Meitner. At present, her research interests include land use and resource management, issues concerning Indigenous land and governance rights, intersections between cultural and environmental values, and environmental justice. Her thesis work explores the representation of Indigenous interests in environmental assessment processes, and the systematic erasure of such interests in proponent certificate applications specifically.

In addition to pursuing graduate studies, Holly also has four years’ experience as a planning associate at EcoPlan International (EPI), a Vancouver-based consulting firm that specializes in community planning and values-based decision making. Holly’s research is supported by SSHRC, Mitacs, and EPI. She holds a BA in political science, also from the University of British Columbia.

 

 

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Photo credit: Julian S. Yates

February 16, 2017: IRES Faculty Seminar
Speaker: Amanda Rodewald, Cornell University

IRES Seminar Series

Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (every Thursday)

Location: AERL Theatre (room 120), 2202 Main Mall

UBC IRES and UBC Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies Joint Event

          

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Can working landscapes work for conservation?

Abstract:

Accelerating rates of land conversion for agriculture, development, and resource extraction have challenged us to identify creative ways to sustain biodiversity, protect ecosystem services, and support human health and well-being within “working landscapes.

This challenge becomes urgent when we consider that in many regions, persistence of the most vulnerable species and ecosystems requires sustainable management of privately-owned and multi-use lands.

Fortunately, there are a growing number of tools and approaches that can be used to identify, monitor, and incentivize key conservation actions.  I highlight examples showing new ways that private sector investments and public-private partnerships can improve sustainability of tropical and temperate agroecosystems and achieve positive social and ecological outcomes at regional, national, and international levels.

Bio:

Amanda Rodewald’s research seeks to understand the behavioral and demographic mechanisms guiding population, community, and landscape-scale responses of birds to land use change and human activity in North, Central and South America.

She tightly integrates her research and outreach efforts to inform policy and management and regularly interacts with government agencies, conservation organizations, and private landowners. Her national leadership activities include service to the Science Advisory Board of the US EPA and as a regular columnist to The Hill.

Optional Reception and Lunch with Amanda Rodewald after the seminar:

Time: 1:30pm to 3:30pm

Location: AERL 107/108 (down the hall from AERL Theatre)

Please RSVP by emailing Peter Arcese (peter.arcese@ubc.ca)

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Amanda Rodewald

Amanda Rodewald

Professor
Director of Conservation Science, Cornell Lab of Ornithology

 

Photo credit: Amanda Rodewald

November 3, 2016: IRES Professional Development Seminar
Speakers: Kai Chan, Hadi Dowlatabadi & Hannah Wittman

IRES Seminar Series

Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (every Thursday)

Location: AERL Theatre (room 120), 2202 Main Mall

Peer Review and Reply: Advice for Graduate Students and Early-career Scientists

Speaker Bios:

Kai Chan

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Kai Chan is a professor and Canada Research Chair (tier 2) at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. Kai is an interdisciplinary, problem-oriented sustainability scientist, trained in ecology, policy, and ethics from Princeton and Stanford Universities. He strives to understand how social-ecological systems can be transformed to be both better and wilder. Kai leads CHANS lab (www.chanslab.ires.ubc.ca), Connecting Human and Natural Systems; he is a Leopold Leadership Program fellow, a director on the board of the BC chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), a director on the board of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology, a member of the Global Young Academy, a senior fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program, a coordinating lead author for the IPBES Global Assessment, and (in 2012) the Fulbright Canada Visiting Research Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

 

Hadi Dowlatabadi

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Hadi sees the world as interacting social, economic and environmental systems. He has over 160 publications, graduated 44 PhDs and studied many systems and their policy solutions. He has served as Lead Author for the IPCC and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. He is Canada Research Chair in Applied Mathematics and Global Change at UBC, Adjunct Professor in Engineering & Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and University Fellow at Resources for the Future. He received his BSc and PhD in Physics from Edinburgh (1980) and Cambridge (1984) Universities respectively. Outside academia, Hadi co-founded Offsetters and five other green-tech firms.

 

Hannah Wittman

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Dr. Hannah Wittman’s research examines the ways that the rights to produce and consume food are contested and transformed through struggles for agrarian reform, food sovereignty, and agrarian citizenship. Her projects include community-based research on farmland access, transition to organic agriculture, and seed sovereignty in British Columbia, agroecological transition and the role of institutional procurement in the transition to food sovereignty in Ecuador and Brazil, and the role that urban agriculture and farm-to-school nutrition initiatives play in food literacy education.

 

 

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Photo credit: Mahbub Islam from flickr/Creative Commons

October 24, 2016: IRES Special Seminar
Speaker: Alex Davis (Carnegie Mellon University)

Guest speaker: Dr. Alex Davis from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA)

Date: Monday, October 24

Time: 10:30am to 12:00pm

Location changed to AERL 107/108.

 

Expert and machine prediction for risk assessment and scientific discovery

Abstract: From radars to radiology, experts have long been asked to detect signals against a noisy and uncertain background. Starting in the middle of the twentieth century, a number of direct comparisons between expert judges and statistical prediction tools found that experts were no better, and most often worse, than even the simplest statistical prediction tools. However, these studies limited experts and tools to the same information, preventing experts from using information in their environment that is not easily translated into statistics. Across a variety of domains, it is not known how much information these tools provide above and beyond assessments made by experts in the natural course of their work. In this talk I discuss ongoing work on predictions by experts about risk and the outcomes of scientific experiments. For the former I discuss a longitudinal cohort study comparing the separate and joint ability of physicians and an electronically integrated statistical prediction tool (the Rothman Index) to predict patient risk of decompensation (defined as a cardiac or respiratory arrest, call to a rapid response team, or transfer to the ICU). For the latter I discuss expert ability to predict optimal combinations of parameters for the development of experimental materials, including nanomaterials, 3D printing of silicone elastomers, and part selection for aerospace metals additive manufacturing.

 

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Photo credit: Fe Ilya from flickr/Creative Commons

 

Bio: Alex Davis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.  He is a member of the Behavior, Decision, and Policy Group, the Carnegie Electricity Industry Center (CEIC), and the Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making (CEDM).  He is currently directing a two year field experiment in collaboration with the Cornell Cooperative Extension examining behavioral approaches to encourage residential energy efficiency, and he is CMU’s acting director of a multi-year, multi-institutional research project on the relationship between science and proven experience.  His research focuses on the behavioral foundations of policy, applied to innovation and entrepreneurship, energy, the environment, health, and information and communication technologies.  He teaches a graduate course in applied data analysis (19-704).

Alex earned his B.S. from Northern Arizona University in Psychology (2007) and his M.S. (2009) and Ph.D. (2012) from Carnegie Mellon University in Behavioral Decision Research.  He worked as a postdoctoral fellow and research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University prior to joining the faculty at Carnegie Mellon.

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March 9, 2017: IRES Faculty Seminar
Speaker: Karen Seto, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies

IRES Seminar Series

Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (every Thursday)

Location: AERL Theatre (room 120), 2202 Main Mall

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Future urban expansion and implications for building energy demand and global croplands

Abstract:

This talk will draw on recent research that examines the implications of future urban expansion on global croplands and energy demand by buildings. Using both top-down and bottom-up approaches and scenarios, we examine operational building energy use, specifically, for heating and cooling. Globally, the energy use for heating and cooling by mid-century will reach anywhere from about 45 EJ/yr to 59 EJ/yr (respectively, increases of 5% to 40% over the 2010 estimate). Most of this variability is due to the uncertainty in future urban densities of rapidly growing cities in Asia and, particularly, in China. A surprising finding is that waiting to retrofit of the existing built environment until markets are ready to widely deploy the most advanced renovation technologies, leads to more savings in building energy use and avoids lock-in.

Our results also show that urban expansion will result in a 1.8-2.4% loss of global croplands by 2030, with substantial regional disparities. About 80% of global cropland loss from urban expansion will take place in Asia and Africa. In both Asia and Africa, much of the cropland that will be lost is more than twice as productive as national averages. Asia will experience the highest absolute loss in cropland while African countries will experience the highest percentage loss of cropland. Globally, the croplands that are likely to be lost were responsible for 3-4% of worldwide crop production in 2000. Urban expansion is expected to take place on cropland that is 1.77 times more productive than the global average. The loss of cropland is likely to be accompanied by other sustainability risks, and threatens livelihoods, with diverging characteristics for different mega-urban regions. Governance of urban area expansion thus emerges as a key area for securing livelihoods in the agrarian economies of the Global South.

This seminar will not be filmed.

Bio:

Karen Seto is Associate Dean for Research and Professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.  She is an expert in characterizing and forecasting urbanization, urban mitigation of climate change, and satellite remote sensing. She has pioneered methods to reconstruct land-use dynamics with satellite data and to forecast the expansion of urban areas. She was a Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, and has served on many U.S. National Research Council Committees, including the NRC Committee on Pathways to Urban Sustainability. She was a founding co-chair of the Urbanization and Global Environmental Change Project of the International Human Dimensions Programme, and Executive Producer of the documentary film, “10,000 Shovels: Rapid Urban Growth in China.” From 2000 to 2008, she was on the faculty at Stanford University, in the Woods Institute for the Environment and the School of Earth Sciences. She was named an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow in 2009. She joined the Yale faculty in 2008.

 

 

forests

Photo credit: faeryhedgehog from flickr/Creative Commons

November 10, 2016: IRES Special Seminar
UBC Reads Sustainability with Simran Sethi

Thursday November 10
12:00pm – 2:00pm
Jack Poole Hall, UBC Alumni Centre
6163 University Boulevard
UBC Vancouver Campus

Join Simran Sethi for this UBC Reads Sustainability talk to find out more about the loss of agricultural biodiversity, efforts to conserve endangered foods and ways we can help save the foods we love. Simran Sethi has spent close to five years meeting tireless, courageous and innovative people dedicated to making our food supply secure, abundant and more delicious. She has travelled across six continents to interview more than 200 scientists, farmers, chefs, bakers, winemakers, beer brewers, coffee roasters, chocolate connoisseurs, conservationists, religious leaders, and advocates and experts of all types to learn the intimate stories of our foods and ways we can better save—and savour—them

Tickets $5/students $10/general

This seminar will not be filmed.

Note: This event is in lieu of the regular IRES Seminar which happens every Thursday in AERL 120.  The next IRES Seminar is on Thursday, November 17 back in AERL 120.

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A RELATED EVENT ON NOVEMBER 9:

This is a free upcoming event at the Liu Institute to welcome Simran Sethi, journalist and educator on food, sustainability, and social change, on Wednesday, November 9th from 5:30-7 PM. This event will include an informal discussion about how we (at UBC) engage with food systems. There will also be plenty of time to interact with friends and colleagues while enjoying some food from local vendors!

Please see the attached flyer for more information, and kindly RSVP if you plan to attend. There are only 40 spots available!

 

 

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Photo credit: StateofIsrael from flickr/Creative Commons

 

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February 2, 2017: IRES Faculty Seminar
Speaker: Simon Donner

IRES Seminar Series

Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (every Thursday)

Location: AERL Theatre (room 120), 2202 Main Mall

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Living Islands: Coping with Sea-level Rise in Kiribati and the Pacific Islands

Abstract:

Pacific Island countries like Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands are existentially threatened by climate change and sea-level rise. The people and the islands themselves are also more resilient than the bold-faced headlines about disappearing islands may have you think. In this presentation, I’ll discuss the science of coral reef islands, the gaps in perception about their present and future, and the immense challenge of helping the local people respond to climate change. The presentation draws upon a decade of research on coastal systems, migration history and adaptation decision-making in the Republic Kiribati, the low-lying central equatorial Pacific nation struggling to deal with sea-level rise.

Bio:

Simon Donner is an Associate Professor of Climatology in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. He teaches and conducts interdisciplinary research at the interface of climate science, marine science, and public policy. Current areas of research include climate change and coral reefs; ocean warming and El Nino; climate change adaptation in small island developing states; public engagement on climate change. He is also the director of UBC’s NSERC-supported “Ocean Leaders” program  and is affiliated with UBC’s Institute of Oceans and Fisheries, Liu Institute for Global Issues, Atmospheric Sciences Program, and Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability.

 

Photo credit: Graham McDowell

February 9, 2017: IRES Student Seminar
Speakers: Anna Schuhbauer and Guillaume Peterson St-Laurent

IRES Seminar Series

Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (every Thursday)

Location: AERL Theatre (room 120), 2202 Main Mall

 

Fisheries subsidies and economic viability of small-scale fisheries

Abstract:

Small-scale fisheries (SSF) provide food and jobs for millions of people worldwide and therefore contribute to the wellbeing of many coastal communities. However, they are currently threatened by overfishing, climate change, industrialization and global market shifts. SSF are politically and economically marginalized as well as understudied. I argue that understanding and improving the economic viability of these fisheries will help prepare them withstand the barrage of threats they face. Unlike financial viability which focuses on profit maximization, economic viability is accomplished when non-negative net benefits to society are achieved. I have identified fisheries subsidies as the main distortion between financial and economic viability. Therefore, I carried out a first global bottom-up assessment that splits subsidy amounts into those received by small- and large-scale fisheries. Results reveal a major imbalance in subsidy distribution. This disproportionate division of subsidies impairs the economic viability of already vulnerable SSF. The results help bridge the current knowledge gap in SSF research essential to policy making and management that would not only improve economic viability but also the sustainability of the fish stocks upon which they rely.

Bio:

My career as a fisheries scientist started with the German Fisheries Department in Hamburg in 2002. I have worked in northern Peru (2005), finished my MSc at the University of Bremen in Germany (2006), worked in the Falkland Islands Fisheries Department (until 2008) and then in the Charles Darwin Foundation on the Galapagos Islands (until 2012). After my work in Galapagos, which focussed mainly on the ecological aspects of fisheries, I decided to study global fisheries economics, focussing on small-scale fisheries and their economic viability. Since 2012 I have been at the Fisheries Centre, now Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at UBC as a PhD student under the supervision of Dr. U. Rashid Sumaila with the Fisheries Economic Research Unit.

Anna Schuhbauer

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Deliberating Climate Change Mitigation Options and Policies in British Columbia’s forests

Abstract:

Forests have attracted substantial policy interest in recent years because of their climate change mitigation potential. While the province of British Columbia (BC) acknowledges the potential of its 55 million hectares of forested areas at mitigating climate change, it still lacks a forest carbon mitigation strategy and largely fails to leverage the opportunities provided by its immense forest sector. Before long, failure to act might even prove a double-edge sword; in the last decade, forests in BC have been transformed from a carbon sink to a carbon source, largely as a result of climate change. In this context, my research aims to shed new light on the advantages and issues associated with existing and prospective climate change mitigation policies and strategies in BC’s forest sector. To be effective and credible, such strategies will not only have to be informed by the best available science, but also to be endorsed by strong public and political support and acceptability. Building on this premise, I also describe a deliberative-analytical process that is currently being carried out with stakeholders in a range of sectors and First Nations across the province to better understand preferences for, and perceived acceptability, credibility and effectiveness of, carbon mitigation options in BC’s forests.

Bio:

Guillaume Peterson is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, a Liu Scholar and a SSHRC fellow (Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral award). His PhD research, supervised by Dr. George Hoberg, is part of a larger research project supported by the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) with the foremost objective to generate recommendations for regionally-differentiated climate change mitigation options for BC’s forest sector.

Guillaume’s broad research interests bring together natural resource management, territorial governance, environmental policies, landscape ecology, climate change mitigation and adaptation and the socio-economic and environmental impacts of the extractive industries. Guillaume holds an MSc from McGill University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and a graduate diploma in management from HEC Montréal. Previously to starting his PhD, he also worked as a conservation project manager for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS).

Guillaume Peterson St-Laurent

 

 

 

 

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Photo credit: Laura Blankenship from flickr/Creative Commons

March 2, 2017: IRES Professional Development Seminar
Speakers: Tara Stephens-Kyte, Leonora Crema and Kai Chan

IRES Seminar Series

Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (every Thursday)

Location: AERL Theatre (room 120), 2202 Main Mall

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Open Access Repository and Publication

Speaker Bios:

Tara Stephens-Kyte



Tara Stephens-Kyte is a Digital Repository Librarian at cIRcle, UBC’s digital repository. She considers this to be a pioneering role that draws on diverse areas of interest including open access publishing, scholarly research impact metrics, and building research networks, among others.

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Leonora Crema



Leonora Crema is UBC‘s Scholarly Communications Librarian. She assists faculty and students with a variety of scholarly publishing issues including author rights, impact metrics, meeting granting agency open access requirements, and new modes of digital dissemination.  Leonora was absent from the seminar due to illness.

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Kai Chan



Kai Chan is a professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. Kai is an interdisciplinary, problem-oriented sustainability scientist, trained in ecology, policy, and ethics from Princeton and Stanford Universities. He strives to understand how social-ecological systems can be transformed to be both better and wilder. Kai leads CHANS lab (www.chanslab.ires.ubc.ca), Connecting Human and Natural Systems; he is a Leopold Leadership Program fellow, a director on the board of the BC chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), a director on the board of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology, a member of the Global Young Academy, a senior fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program, a coordinating lead author for the IPBES Global Assessment, and (in 2012) the Fulbright Canada Visiting Research Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

 

To view presentation slides, click here.

 

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Photo credit: Thomas Chung from flickr/Creative Commons