March 21, 2024: IRES Student Seminar with Joanne Fitzgibbons and Imranul Laskar

1. Rewilding as a Plural Boundary Object: Implications for Research and Practice

2. Characterizing uncertainties in the decarbonization of maritime shipping: an expert elicitation study

Time: 12:30pm to 1:20pm

Location: Beaty Museum Theatre, Allan Yap Theatre (Basement, 2212 Main Mall) Please check in at front desk on main floor before going downstairs.

No food or drinks allowed in the Theatre.

View Video Here

Talk summary:

Roughly one million irreplaceable species face extinction. Addressing this biodiversity crisis will require collaborative effort, not only to prevent further losses, but also to recover lost species and ecological processes. “Rewilding” is one such regenerative approach that uses tools like species reintroduction and landscape restoration to restore degraded ecosystems. However, the meaning of rewilding is hotly contested, and much scientific energy has been devoted to establishing a discrete, “unifying” definition. We argue that rewilding is a “boundary object” that will inevitably be understood, summoned and valued differently by diverse actors with varied goals. This reality comes with pros and cons: boundary objects can be evocative orienting points to foster collaboration and dialogue, but their malleability can also produce conflict, confusion and manipulation. Using case studies of global rewilding projects, we explore the implications of this plurality for practice and scholarship.

**Joanne Fitzgibbons,** *IRES PhD Candidate*

Bio:

Jo Fitzgibbons is a PhD Candidate in CHANS Lab at the UBC Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) and a Planning Analyst with the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation. With an interdisciplinary background in urban planning, geography and international development, her research explores inclusion of plural knowledge systems in planning and public engagement, and the role of evocative discourses such as “rewilding” and “resilience” as orienting points for more inclusive sustainability action.

Talk summary:

Maritime shipping is the backbone of global trade and economy. It is also a significant contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, accounting for ~3% of world’s annual GHG emissions, and expected to rise to 17% by 2050. The International Maritime Organization (IMO), a UN special agency and the de facto global shipping regulator, recently adopted an ambitious GHG Strategy aligning the maritime shipping sector with a 1.5°C-warming scenario. However, concrete policy instruments are yet to be adopted, with deliberations underway on adopting a global carbon tax and a GHG intensity standard by 2027. While the regulatory landscape has been rapidly evolving, deep decarbonization of the sector is mired with uncertainties. In this talk, I will present a summary of results from an expert elicitation study that we employ to characterize and understand some of these uncertainties in decarbonizing maritime shipping.

**Imranul Laskar**, *IRES PhD Candidate*

Bio:

Imranul Laskar is a PhD Candidate in Amanda Giang’s lab at IRES. His research interests center around the intersection of science, technology, and policy, specifically within the domains of pollution, energy, and climate. Currently, his research focuses on understanding uncertainties, policy approaches, and air quality co-benefits and trade-offs during decarbonization in the maritime transportation sector. Imranul holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, and an MSc. in environmental engineering from the University of Alberta. He serves in a capacity within the federal government and has previously held research and leadership positions in municipal governments, environmental consulting, and the oil, gas, and petrochemical sectors.

January 18, 2024: IRES Student Seminar with Kushank Bajaj on Zoom only

Transboundary climate risks of Canada’s fruit and vegetable supply

Time: 12:30pm to 1:00pm

Location: Zoom only due to weather.

View Video Recording.

Talk summary:

Fruits and vegetables are an integral part of a healthy diet. However, ensuring Canadians have sufficient and affordable access to fresh produce can be challenging, particularly in an increasingly shock-prone world. Part of the challenge arises from Canada’s heavy dependence on international trade for its fruit and vegetable supply—a system vulnerable to cascading disruptions. To better understand these vulnerabilities, in this study I map the spatially-explicit supply chains of 18 fruits and 16 vegetables for Canadian provinces from 2010 to 2022, accounting for interprovincial flows. I employ a mass-balance approach, drawing on customs-based trade, production, and demand data. Further, by integrating these data with future extreme weather indices derived from downscaled and bias-corrected ensemble climate models, I discern Canada’s consumption-based and cross-border exposure to weather extremes in a warmer world. During this seminar, I will present the methods employed to develop fruit and vegetable flows, describe the supply chains by province and produce, and outline future weather extreme exposures in these supply chains.

Bio:

Kushank Bajaj is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability, a Doctoral Fellow with the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, and a Climate Policy Researcher with Generation Squeeze. At UBC, he is supervised by Prof. Navin Ramankutty. Kushank is an interdisciplinary researcher studying sustainable food systems and systemic climate risks. He utilizes data science and data visualization skills combined with a policy-relevant focus. Kushank’s research experience, working in the not-for-profit and government sectors, has trained him to work with diverse datasets and at multiple scales from global to hyper-local.

[CANCELED] Talk summary:

Rewilding is emerging as a powerful concept to alleviate the combined extinction and climate crises, by restoring biological complexity to enhance ecological interactions and ecosystem services. I will discuss the need for a broader vision of rewilding that can encompass all kinds of habitats – from wildlands to agroecosystems to urban habitats – aiming at ‘increasing wildness, everywhere’ for the benefit of all beings. Based on deep ecological theory and recognizing the inherent value of wildlife in regulating and regenerating the biosphere, deep rewilding seeks to develop management practices that could recover ecosystem functions and services, using Pleistocene biotic communities that coevolved together for millions of years as inspiration, not as targets. I will argue that there is an important role for deep rewilding in planning and conducting long-term rewilding processes, illustrated by marine and terrestrial examples, and a large-scale experiment in Brazil.

**Alberto Alves Campos**, *IRES PhD Candidate*

Bio:

Alberto is a PhD candidate in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, supervised by Dr. Kai Chan, with a Vanier Canada graduate scholarship. As a conservation biologist, Alberto co-founded the NGO Aquasis (www.aquasis.org) and worked as its principal Director for nearly 20 years, promoting endangered species and habitat conservation in Brazil. He has received three Conservation Leadership Awards and the prestigious Future for Nature Award. In 2017 Aquasis received the Brazilian National Biodiversity Award for downlisting endangered species in the Brazilian and IUCN red lists, and for the long-term commitment with biodiversity conservation and community engagement.

February 29, 2024: IRES Student Seminar with Tatiana Chamorro-Vargas and Jumi Gogoi

Talk titles:

1) Revealing the pathways to scale up agricultural transformation: Factors influencing adoption of Silvo pastoral systems in Colombia

2) Developing a field-scale crop yield prediction model using satellite and environmental data

Time: 12:30pm to 1:20pm

Location: Beaty Museum Allan Yap Theatre (Basement, 2212 Main Mall) Please check in at the Admissions Desk first before going to the Theatre.

No food or drinks allowed in the Theatre.

View Video Recording.

Talk summary:

Colombia is a global biodiversity hotspot of important ecological significance. However, deforestation is rampant in the country, and its primary cause is extensive cattle ranching which is inefficient, susceptible to climatic events, contributes to poverty, and causes unsustainable levels of environmental degradation such as water pollution. An agroecological alternative to ECR is Silvopastoral systems (SPS) which combine trees and shrubs in forage grasses to enhance cattle production. Thus, the goal of my research is to determine how SPS practices can be scaled out.

**Tatiana Chamorro-Vargas**, *IRES MSc Student*

Bio:

Tatiana Chamorro (she/her) is an MSc student in the Working to Restore Connectivity and Sustainability (WoRCS) Lab at IRES and is supervised by Dr. Claire Kremen. Her research focuses on the scaling up of sustainable cattle ranching practices in Colombia, as she is highly interested in biodiversity conservation and ecology. She is a recipient of the Philip A. Jones Fellowship 2022-2023. She is also the trip coordinator for the RES Student Society.

Talk summary:

Timely and reliable estimation of crop production is essential for strategic decision making in the agricultural system. Recently, detailed ground-based field-scale yield datasets have become available providing a timely opportunity for using high spatial resolution observational data for model training. The key research objective was to develop a crop-yield prediction model using satellite and biophysical data and calibrated using field-scale yield monitor data.

**Jumi Gogoi**, *recent PhD graduate in IRES*

Bio:

Jumi recently completed her PhD in IRES under the supervision of Dr. Navin Ramankutty. She is pursuing her research interests in mobilizing methods from data science to answer questions about food security. Her PhD work specifically focuses on developing modeling methods using different datasets for improving prediction of crop production. Jumi has an interdisciplinary academic background and has completed studies in analytics, economics, and business.

March 28, 2024: IRES & IBioS Co-Seminar with Katie Fiorella

Environmental Change in Cambodia’s Social-Ecological Food Systems

Location: HENN 202 – Hennings Building, 6224 Agricultural Road (at East Mall)

No food or drinks allowed in the Theatre.

Time: 12:30pm to 1:20pm

Click here to register for Zoom link. Zoom will be terminated if we encounter tech problems 5 to 10 mins into the seminar.

Talk summary:

Social-ecological systems are changing at an unprecedented rate. As our environments are revamped, what does that mean for the people who live and work within these systems? How does it impact their choices about how to use fisheries and their access to biodiversity within them? We will use the case of Cambodia’s social-ecological food systems — where fishery dependence is exceptionally high and flood plain fisheries are vulnerable to climate change and upstream shifts in the Mekong River flows — to examine these questions. We will consider how climate change will impact the system, how the extent of biodiversity in the ecosystem is used, and how community fish refuges, a strategy to increase fish catch, may benefit fish access. This talk will ask both how people adapt and the constraints they face, and how they see the ramifications of environmental change for their health and well-being.

**Dr. Katie Fiorella**, *Assistant Professor*,
Department of Public and Ecosystem Health
Cornell University

Bio:

I am an environmental scientist and epidemiologist, and my research aims to understand the interactions among environmental change and livelihood, food, and nutrition security. My work is focused on global fisheries and the households that are reliant on the environment to access food and income. I use interdisciplinary methods and my work aims to foster a deeper understanding of how ecological and social systems interact, the ways communities and households adapt to and mitigate environmental change, and the links between human well being and ecological sustainability.

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Scientists Flag Conflicts of Interest Ahead of UN Plastic and Chemical Talks

written by Rebecca Fuoco at the Green Science Policy Institute

An international group of 35 scientists, including IRES’s Gunilla Öberg, is calling out conflicts of interest plaguing global plastic treaty negotiations that have interfered with timely action on other health and environmental issues. They urge the implementation of strict guidelines to prevent the same problems from affecting the UN’s Science Policy Panel on chemicals. Their concerns and recommendations are outlined in a featured paper in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

“From Big Tobacco to Big Oil, powerful industries use the same playbook to manufacture doubt and sow misinformation,” said co-author Bethanie Carney Almroth, a Professor at the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Gothenburg. “The plastic and chemical industries already have a long history of deploying these tactics to hamper regulatory efforts. Our health and that of the planet upon which we rely, can’t afford any further subversion of efforts to reduce the widespread contamination of our air and water.”

The group’s warning comes as countries prepare to meet next week for the third UN plastic treaty negotiation session in Nairobi. Though scientists had advised against it, the plastic and petrochemical industries were actively involved in the first round of negotiations in 2022. The paper notes that industry representatives pushed misleading statements, including the debunked claim that plastic production will help fight climate change. To date, no action has been taken to curb these conflicts of interest.

The scientists express concern that similar issues could arise in the development of the UN Science Policy Panel on chemicals, waste, and pollution. The UN Environment Assembly decided in 2022 to establish this Panel to support countries in their efforts to protect human and ecosystem health through scientific assessments. As the working group to create the Panel will meet Dec. 11-15, today’s paper is a call to protect its work from undue influence by companies with a vested interest in revenue-generating chemicals.

“Letting polluters have a say in pollution protections is the epitome of the fox guarding the henhouse,” said lead author Andreas Schäffer, a Professor at RWTH Aachen University and board member of the International Panel on Chemical Pollution. “Just like the tobacco industry was restricted from WHO’s work on smoking, the UN shouldn’t let the chemical industry’s hired guns dilute global guidelines for chemical and waste management.”

The participation of industry in a UN intergovernmental science-policy body would not be unprecedented. For example, fossil fuel representatives co-authored major reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Science Policy’s Panel analogue for climate.

To ensure the effectiveness of the Science Policy Panel, the scientists who co-authored the paper issue the following key recommendations that should be incorporated into the process:

Define clear and strict conflict of interest provisions.
Do not confuse the undesirable conflicts of financial or political competing interests with legitimate interests or biases.
Install regular audits of the Panel’s work to check for conflict of interest.
Secure as many elements of transparency as possible.

Available for Interviews:

Prof. Andreas Schäffer, Institute for Environmental Research, RWTH Aachen University, Board member of the academic organisation IPCP (www.IPCP.ch), lead author of the paper, Phone: +49 (0) 241 / 80-26815 / -26678, andreas.schaeffer@bio5.rwth-aachen.de

Prof. Martin Scheringer, Dep. of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zürich, Board member of the academic organisation IPCP (www.IPCP.ch), attending the meeting for the development of the UN Science Policy Panel on chemicals, waste, and pollution, +41 44 632 30 62, scheringer@usys.ethz.ch

Prof. Bethanie Carney Almroth, Dept of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Gothenburg; Steering Committee member of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, attending the UN plastic treaty negotiation, +46 732 261569, + 46 766 18 3673 bethanie.carney@bioenv.gu.se

Dr. Jane Muncke, Food Packaging Forum Foundation, attending the UN plastic treaty negotiation, +41763168145, jane.muncke@fp-forum.org

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February 8, 2024: IRES Faculty Seminar with Tabitha Robin

Food as healer, food as helper: Towards Cree food sovereignties

Location: Beaty Museum Allan Yap Theatre (Basement, 2212 Main Mall). Please check in at front desk on main floor before going downstairs.

No food or drinks allowed in the Theatre.

Time: 12:30pm to 1:20pm

Click here to register for Zoom link. Zoom will be terminated if we encounter tech problems 5 to 10 mins into the seminar.

This seminar will not be recorded.

Talk summary:

Historically and contemporarily, colonial policies and prejudices have deeply affected Indigenous food systems and thus Indigenous bodies. For Cree peoples in Manitoba, these policies include the criminalization of practicing traditional medicines, residential schools and land dispossession in the name of development. However, despite the challenges and interruptions to food and cultural systems, Cree Elders understand food to be sacred, and moreover, a healer. This qualitative study, grounded in Indigenous research methodologies, sought to investigate the role of food in Cree culture, through understanding how Elders incorporate food into their helping and healing practices. Using metaphor to make meaning of the Elder stories, this research articulates the role of food in Cree culture: through feeding oneself, one’s ancestors, and one’s community. The Elders revealed the rich depth of Cree food knowledges that underlie Cree culture, from star stories, language, and grieving ceremonies to knowledge of plant and food medicines. This presentation is an exploration of Cree guidance for revitalizing and rebuilding Cree food systems as part of a larger Indigenous food sovereignty framework.

**Dr. Tabitha Robin**, Assistant Professor
Faculty of Land and Food Systems

Bio:

Tabitha Robin is a mixed ancestry Metis and Cree researcher, educator, and writer. She is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia. She spends much of her time learning about traditional Cree food practices.

New report on urban bats in Vancouver from grad student Daniel Forrest and alum Julia Craig

With funding from UBC’s Ocean Leaders program and the City of Vancouver, Forrest and Craig used bats as an exemplary group to identify existing supportive ecosystems (bat “hotspots”), areas that could or currently connect those ecosystems, and interventions which might help contribute to both.

Read the full report here.

This post was compiled by Nivretta Thatra | October 27, 2023

Urbanization is one of the key drivers of biodiversity loss, and urban residents increasingly lack access to green spaces in growing and densifying cities. The City of Vancouver aims to address these concerns by embedding nature and its benefits in their planning, making space for urban nature, and providing greater access to nature for all residents. To inform and achieve this type of planning, the City worked with Forrest and Craig to identify, rehabilitate, and connect ecological bat “hotspots” in Vancouver.

Bats represent an often overlooked but important indicator species for ecosystem health and biodiversity. They depend on healthy insect populations, cleanfreshwater, and roosting habitats, and so their populations reflect the health of the these factors. Moreover, bats directly benefit urban residents by controlling vectors for disease and agricultural pest insects.

However, little is known about the ways that bats exploit novel urban habitats and how bat communities change as a result of urbanization. This is especially true in Vancouver, BC, where few bat surveys have been done, and none, to Forrest and Craig’s knowledge, have been conducted throughout residential, commercial, industrial, and other non-forest or park habitats prior to this study. In this report, they surveyed for bats throughout the cities of Vancouver and Richmond, BC using a novel acoustic bicycle transect method: Craig, then an M.Sc. at IRES, biked throughout the city and detected bats with recording device.

They then statistically modeled the relationship of bat detections with urban landscape and environmental variables across two bat functional groups (see glossary) to 1) understand how they respond to urban land uses and 2) infer and recommend interventions that may enable a greater diversity and abundance of bats in the city.

Results

At least 10 species of bats occur in Vancouver and Richmond, BC
The most abundant species are generalists (e.g., little brown and big brown bats)
Forested green spaces and freshwater bodies capable of supporting high insect densities likely host the greatest abundance and diversity of bats
Active and passive human activity, including traffic and other sources of noise and light, likely exclude bats from some otherwise viable habitats
Surprisingly, low-frequency bats were found to be positively associated with industrial areas
The diversity of habitats in the region (including forested parks, open parks, ponds, lakes, wetlands, houses, bridges, and other potential bat roosts) likely contributes to the relatively high diversity of species found here

Figure 4. Map depicting model predictions of the likelihood of bat detection across the Metro
Vancouver area. Light colors indicate high likelihood of detection, dark indicates low likelihood.
The light blue translucent layer depicts rivers and sea. Land area falls within those boundaries,
except for the eastern edge.

Recommendations to support bat abundance and diversity

Create or improve the quality of forest, forest clearings and edge habitats (e.g., savannah or meadow-like areas adjacent forests)
Create or improve the quality of freshwater bodies and surrounding vegetation to help bats drink water and eat insects
Maintain or create roosting habitat (e.g., mature trees, old buildings)
Reduce light and noise in preferred bat habitats (e.g., near freshwater, near dense, diverse, and tall vegetation)