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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
________________________________________ 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.
Harmonizing Conservation with Agricultural Production Across Working Landscapes
Abstract: A critical challenge for this century is transitioning towards sustainable food systems that are productive and secure for both nature and people. Yet conservation scientists and practitioners have traditionally fixated on protected areas and overlooked opportunities for pursuing conservation in working landscapes. In Costa Rica, I found that diversified agricultural systems— with multiple crops and patches of native vegetation— sustained remarkable concentrations of biodiversity. Conserving biodiversity also benefited farmers. Maintaining forests and their associated birds near farms halved infestations of coffee’s most damaging insect pest, preventing US$70-US$310/ha in damage. In California, however, wildlife is being systematically eradicated from farms, following a deadly 2006 E. coli outbreak in fresh spinach that was loosely linked to wild pigs. My work has documented how such food-safety scares can reverberate through socio-ecological systems, causing rapid changes in agricultural practices and ecosystem services. For example, I found that the now widespread practice of removing nearby non-crop vegetation (perceived as wildlife habitat) is not effective, and may even be increasing the prevalence of foodborne pathogens (e.g., enterohemorrhagic E. coli and Salmonella enterica) in leafy green vegetables. Moreover, I found that adjacent habitat was associated with high levels of arthropod biodiversity and better control of farmland pests. These results suggest that conserving non-crop vegetation in farmland, or diversifying farms more broadly, can often represent a promising win-win opportunity for biodiversity and farmers.
Photo credit: Jill Guerra
Bio: Daniel Karp is currently a Killam postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, and will be starting an assistant professor position at the University of California, Davis in January 2017. Daniel completed his Ph.D. in 2013 and undergraduate studies in 2009 at Stanford University’s Department of Biology. He has published >20 papers in high-impact journals such as Science, Nature, PNAS, and Ecology Letters. Broadly, Daniel’s interests center on developing innovative methods for harmonizing food production with the conservation of ecosystem services and biodiversity. His research thus focuses on developing innovative solutions for reconciling conservation activities with food production practices. His research program has four thrusts. First, he develops and applies ecological theory to understanding and managing biodiversity in human-dominated landscapes. Second, he quantifies the effects of alternative agricultural practices on biodiversity-mediated ecosystem services to people. Third, he investigates how identifying tradeoffs among biodiversity and ecosystem services can inform development of multifunctional landscapes. Finally, Daniel works extensively with interdisciplinary scientists and practitioners to synthesize science and guide policy.
Abstract: The world is increasingly interconnected through global supply chains. Trillions of dollars a year of merchandise travel across oceans and continents, linking low cost manufacturers from the global South to large discount-driven consumer markets in the North. While the economic benefits are measured and appreciated, the environmental and social costs are distanced, unaccounted for and growing. At the Global Reporting Centre we have been reporting on various aspects of global supply chains: from the sources of timber, to the environmental effects of shrimp farming, to the path of electronic waste exports to developing countries. We have brought together leading scholars at UBC and around the world, to collaborate with Emmy- and Pulitzer-winning journalists, to embark on an ambitious research project Hidden Costs of Global Supply Chains. Prof. Klein will be presenting some of the findings of this research, and will shows part of the award-winning journalist projects that have come from the project, including a New York Times series, a Toronto Star documentary and a PBS Frontline film that earned an Emmy for Best Investigation.
Bio: Peter W. Klein is the founder of the Global Reporting Centre, a non-profit focused on producing and innovating journalism on under-reported issues around the world. He is former director of the University of British Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where he continues to teach the International Reporting course, in which his students spend a year reporting on a global topic and partnering with major media. He was a longtime producer at CBS News 60 Minutes, and is a regular opinion contributor to The Globe & Mail. He is the recipient of numerous journalism awards, including several Emmy, Murrow and Sigma Delta Chi awards. He has an MS in Journalism from Columbia, and lives in Vancouver, Canada, with his wife and four children.
The Influence of Financial Factors on Sustainable Design Decisions
Abstract:
As more people become city dwellers than ever before, urban growth and land development impulses often trend toward less socially and environmentally balanced outcomes. While this is part of a much larger tendency that can be seen in the broader development of our species, there are two major reasons this shortcoming exists presently:
Most urban development and change currently occurs within a real estate development model that rewards a short-term return on investment for its agents, with little to no incentive to maximize long-term performance or benefits, whether socially, physically or economically.
Tools and data that communicate communitarian, regenerative, sustainable goals effectively in the financial language of this agent do not largely exist at present.
Planners, designers, and regulators could all benefit from the availability of more arguments and benchmarks that incorporate financial implications to communicate preferred positive outcomes to these agents. “Green” certifications for buildings and communities attempt to bridge some of this gap by providing its inhabitants a branded, standardized endorsement of long-term quality. However, space often exists between these rating systems’ intentions, and their outcomes.
A better understanding of how the hundreds of individual design decisions that make up sustainable designs are achieved in an environment of financially influenced decisionmaking could help close this gap between the commercial obligations and priorities of the property owners, and outcomes that benefit all. To investigate this, the influences and criteria behind the design choices at several exemplar developments are considered, using the options encouraged within LEED and other certification systems as a basis for investigation.
Bio:
Aaron Moguin is an urban planner and designer with experience creating and influencing innovative, elegant and collaborative designs and policies on three continents. He is pursuing a Masters degree at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at UBC.
Assessing the Impacts of Retail Supply Chains on Food Security and Agricultural Sustainability in the Global South: The Case of Walmart in Nicaragua
Abstract:
Multinational food retailers are expanding in size and reach, gaining buyer-driven power to govern global agrifood production and consumption. There is at the same time a growing belief by governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that corporate social responsibility (CSR) will be effective at achieving rural development goals for smallholder farmers and their families in the global South. This presentation highlights the on-the-ground impacts of rising corporate governance for household food security and agricultural sustainability through the case of Walmart in Nicaragua. It focuses on how and why the particular terms of farmer engagement in retail-led supply chains mediate these impacts. The analysis is based on nine months of original fieldwork in Nicaragua in 2013, including 65 interviews with produce sector stakeholders and a survey of 250 smallholder vegetable farmers. The study results extend understanding of why CSR is not necessarily an effective development strategy. The findings challenge theories of private governance effectiveness, showing that multinational retail CSR programs in some cases fail to increase control over suppliers, and highlighting the agency and dynamism of smallholder farmers and governments in the global South.
Bio:
Sara Elder is a PhD Candidate in Resources, Environment and Sustainability at UBC. Her research focuses on issues at the intersection of global economics, community development and the environment. Sara’s current research examines the rise in private governance of agrifood supply chains and the consequences for smallholder farmer food security and environmental sustainability in the global South. Her work has been published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, World Development, and the Journal of Rural Studies. Sara holds an MA in Resource Management and Environmental Studies (2010), where she studied the effects of Fair Trade certification on the livelihoods of Rwandan coffee producers, and a BA in International Relations (2004). Her professional experience includes international development work with communities in Canada, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, and Bolivia, and technical and policy work at the International Labour Organization in Geneva.
Location: AERL Building Room 107/108, 2202 Main Mall
Want to write a winning masters, doctoral, or postdoctoral award application (NSERC, SSHRC or otherwise)? Nervous about crafting an application that stands out among the rest? Come on out to this awards information session and kick-start the writing process with some great tips and strategies for creating a successful application.
During this session, IRES Professor Dr. Kai Chan will explore the key elements of successful NSERC and SSHRC research proposals, and will take questions from the audience.
Kai’s experience as an adjudicator in national, university, and departmental processes for a variety of awards—and his record mentoring students to success in such competitions—makes this talk extremely worthwhile.
Harnessing Academic Training to Advance Work in the Public Interest
Speaker Bios:
Sophia Murphy
Sophia Murphy has twenty-five years of professional experience in international development cooperation. She works on multilateral and regional trade and investment agreements and their relationship to food security and rural development. Her research and advocacy has ranged across diverse dimensions of food systems, including international trade law, domestic support programs in a dozen countries, rural development, food aid, the right to food, international commodity agreements, and concentrated economic power in food and agriculture markets. She has worked for non-governmental organizations and the United Nations, and consulted with government agencies and think tanks. She has given public lectures and taught her own undergraduate level course on food policy. In 2013, Sophia enrolled in a full-time PhD program at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. She is a PhD Candidate and expects to complete her degree in 2017. Sophia is serving her second concurrent term as one of 15 members of the international High Level Panel of Experts to the UN Committee on World Food Security. She is the Chair of the Board of Directors of ActionAid USA. She writes for both academic and non-academic audiences, and has given interviews for national television, radio and print media in several countries. She is bilingual (English/French) and a dual national of Canada and the UK.
Kirsten Dales
Kirsten Dales is the Associate Director of Canadian International Resources and Development Institute (CIRDI), where she leads program delivery of CIRDI’s international portfolio in Asia, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Her work involves human-environment interactions in industrial landscapes, with a specialization in artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) and natural resource conflicts. Kirsten has a strong technical background in environmental sciences, international policy and resource governance. She holds appointments as a Doctoral Fellow in Forest Science and Conservation at the University of British Columbia (UBC), and as a Research Scholar for the Liu Institute on Global Studies, Yale’s Center for Industrial Ecology and the African Forest Research Initiative on Conservation and Development (AFRICAD). Her academic research exists at the science-policy interface, developing methods for geographically representative monitoring and modeling of mercury contamination to support activities under the Minamata Convention.
Conor Reynolds
Conor Reynolds obtained his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Dublin, Trinity (Ireland). He moved to Canada in 1999 to pursue a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering at UBC, and subsequently worked as a research engineer in UBC’s Clean Energy Research Centre. Between 2005 and 2010 he pursued an interdisciplinary PhD in Resource Management and Environmental Studies from IRES on the topic of air pollutant and climate forcing emissions from transportation. As part of his PhD project he worked in Delhi, India for extended periods of time. His postdoc was also based on fieldwork in India, measuring emissions from biomass cook stoves in rural Karnataka. Since 2011, Conor has been part of the Air Quality & Climate Change team at Metro Vancouver, the regional government that delivers services, policy and political leadership on behalf of 23 local authorities. Conor’s work is primarily related to energy and climate change, in particular projects related to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from Metro Vancouver’s corporate operations. He is interested in the application of interdisciplinary, policy-relevant research on the topics of mobility options in urban areas, environmental and human health impacts of energy use, and how emerging energy technologies can impact GHG emission. Conor is also an Adjunct Professor in IRES.
