How do land-use-based climate strategies reorder the local geography of risk for urban residents? In this talk, I argue that the answer to this question is more complicated than the one commonly presented in public discourse. If processes outlined within established “green gentrification” research continue as an engine for change in cities, then urban climate interventions cannot be understood as simple risk reduction actions. Rather, they have to be seen as actions that reorder the spatial dimension of risk – or, in other words, create a new riskscape pattern – within cities. This reordering occurs specifically because of interactions across social and ecological risks. I will outline these interactions based on my recent research and discuss what this way of thinking about planning interventions means for the practice of green climate urbanism.
Dr. James J.T. Connolly, Assistant Professor School of Community and Regional Planning
Bio:
James J.T. Connolly is Assistant Professor of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia and the former Co-Director of the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) within the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology (ICTA). His research interests focus on the intersection of urban greening and social justice, with a focus on processes of green gentrification, climate risk, and the politics of urban transformation.
1. Energy Transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Review of the Factors Inhibiting Accelerated Progress
2. Revealing the pathways to scale up agricultural transformation: Factors influencing adoption of Silvo pastoral systems in Colombia
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.
Zoom is not available for this seminar.
Talk summary:
The existential threat posed by climate change has propagated a global movement towards the transition from the use of fossils to the development of renewable sources of resources. The Paris Accord and subsequent climate treaties recognize the need to reduce the unabated use of coal and increase investments in renewables. Notably, while nearly 200 countries acceded to the global climate pacts, some countries (particularly in the global South), have rejected the aggressive phaseout of coal, citing the need for a just and gradual transition that mitigates the financial and economic risks of eliminating fossils. The UNFCCC (2021) reported in its NDC Synthesis Report that several national action plans fall short of the required action to mitigate climate change which may push performance to a maximum threshold of only 3.5 degrees Celsius global warming by 2100 above the desired target of limiting global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (if possible 1.5 degrees) of the pre-industrial temperatures. The evidence documents the existence of enabling policies and vast green resources in the Sub-Saharan region. However, the region continues to lag behind on its climate goals. A number of political promises have been made including a target to attain 100% transition to green energy by 2030 – which is deemed to be ‘overly ambitious’ by the international community. In this thesis, I explore energy transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa with a focus on Kenya, Uganda and South-Africa – examining trends, challenges and future prospects.
Lindah Ddamba, IRES MA Student
Bio:
Lindah holds a bachelor’s degree in law from Makerere University, Uganda (2010) and a Master of Laws Degree (2014) from the University of Toronto- Canada, where she majored in energy regulation and resource governance. Shortly thereafter, she worked as a Senior Legal Officer of the Uganda Electricity Regulatory Authority for four years. Her role involved the evaluation of electricity projects for development and she worked on a number of electricity policies and laws. Her research focus at IRES is on the promotion of renewables, where she seeks to evaluate the obstacles to accelerated energy transitions in developing economies with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa
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.
This seminar is co-sponsored by the Climate Solutions Research Collective: https://climatesolutions.ubc.ca/. The Drawdown Roadmap is a science-based strategy for accelerating climate solutions. It points to which climate actions governments, businesses, investors, philanthropists, community organizations, and others should prioritize to make the most of our efforts to stop climate change.
By showing how to strategically mobilize solutions across sectors, time, and place, engage the power of co-benefits, and recognize and remove obstacles, the Drawdown Roadmap charts a path to accelerate climate solutions before it’s too late.
Dr. Jonathan Foley, Executive Director of Project Drawdown
Bio:
Dr. Jonathan Foley is the Executive Director of Project Drawdown, the world’s leading resource for climate solutions. He is a world-renowned environmental scientist, sustainability expert, author, and public speaker. His work focuses on understanding our changing planet and finding new solutions to sustain the climate, ecosystems, and natural resources we all depend on.
Location: Michael Smith Labs Theatre (102-2185 East Mall)
This seminar is in-person only.
This seminar will not be recorded.
Talk summary:
This talk will define the feminist concept of “weathering” and describe how it can be used to guide research design and analysis in interdisciplinary environmental studies. We will illustrate how this concept works using practical examples from our own research as The Weathering Collective, and other initiatives in Canada (The FEELed Lab) and Australia (Community Weathering Station). People interested in climate change want us to speak about the rain, but we want to speak about social relations. Attentive to the logic of weathering, we can build a new language to speak about how meteorological weather intersects with anthropocentric politics and infrastructures in ways that insist that weather, and by extension climate change, are always more-than-meteorological. Weathering demands that research on climate change attend to the experiences and inheritances of bodies in all of their differences. As we are always weathering, how can we use this capacious concept to help shape research methods and questions? How might these questions illuminate different kinds of mitigation and adaptation measures as necessary for better weathering?
Dr. Astrida Neimanis (right), Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities, and Director of the FEELed Lab at UBC Okanagan Dr. Jennifer Hamilton (left), Senior Lecturer in Literary Studiesat University of New England, founder of The Community Weathering Station
Bio:
Astrida Neimanis is Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities, and Director of the FEELed Lab at UBC Okanagan (Kelowna, Canada); Jennifer Mae Hamilton is Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at UNE (Armidale, Australia) and founder of CoWS (The Community Weathering Station). Since 2015, Jennifer and Astrida have been been experimenting, researching, writing, and making together: as co-coordinators of COMPOSTING Feminisms and the Environmental Humanities; as co-convenors of Hacking the Anthropocene 2016-2018, and (with Tessa Zettel) as founding members of TheWeathering Collective. Their most recent co-authored publication is “Feminist Infrastructures for Better Weathering” (Australian Feminist Studies, 2021).
Ecological economists posit that rather than having GDP growth as the goal that trumps all others, societies should seek to build just and resilient economies that support human and ecosystem wellbeing within planetary boundaries. Long concerned about the accelerating ecological crisis, an ecological economist has worked in different capacities, driven by a desire to help shift society away from an economic path that is breaching multiple planetary boundaries and degrading the natural systems that humanity depends upon. His career has included working for an Indigenous government to advance land rights, as an academic researcher and university lecturer, and as a policy adviser working for environmental organizations. This engaging talk will be of interest to those who are interested in how those who draw upon an ecological economics perspective can inform education, advocacy and policy and the roadblocks, frustrations and windows of opportunity that emerge in a world still largely entangled in an economic worldview of ever growing GDP and consumption.
Dr.Tom Green, Senior Climate Policy Adviser, David Suzuki Foundation
Bio:
Tom Green is Senior Climate Policy Adviser at the David Suzuki Foundation, working to advance climate policies to rapidly reduce emissions and accelerate the shift to a clean economy that delivers wellbeing within planetary boundaries. He advocates for strong federal and provincial climate policies, including on methane, transportation, clean energy transition and carbon pricing.
From 2019 to 2022, he led the foundation’s Clean Power Pathways project, a collaboration with university research partners that coupled strategic electricity decarbonization modelling research with public engagement to advance a national zero-emissions electricity grid by 2035.
Tom has carried out research and taught at Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia, Simon Fraser University, Royal Roads University, Quest University Canada and the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. He was a founding member of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics. He has a PhD from the University of British Columbia.
Tom previously worked as socio-economic advisor for Rainforest Solutions Project, a coalition of environmental groups that helped set aside 3.1 million hectares of BC’s Great Bear Rainforest. He also was environmental advisor and assistant to the chief negotiator for the Innu Nation.
Sustainability impacts of commodity production such as agriculture and mining activities are associated to complex and often opaque supply chains connecting producers to consumers across the globe.
Here, I will present our work, in particular as part of the Trase initiative trase.earth, to improve traceability of supply chains, i.e. the capacity to map flows of products across the supply chain, and their transparency, i.e. the public disclosure of that information. We combine production, logistical infrastructure, customs and other data to map supply chains from subnational sourcing to importing countries, identify actors operating the supply chain (in particular traders), and attribute the associated sustainability impacts such as deforestation. I will present insights on supply chains including soy and beef from Brazil, and cocoa from Ivory Coast, and discuss key lessons but also caveats in how traceability and transparency can be crucial to designing, implementing and monitoring governance interventions to improve the sustainability of commodity supply chains.
Dr. Patrick Meyfroidt, Visiting Professor at IRES
Bio:
Patrick Meyfroidt holds a PhD in geography (2009) and a degree in sociology from Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium. Since 2016 he is Research Associate at the F.R.S-FNRS (the Belgian Research Funds) and Professor at UCLouvain.
His research focuses on how land use and more broadly land systems can contribute to sustainability. He is visiting UBC (Liu Institute – SPPGA & IRES) from August 2022 to July 2023.
Pacific Northwest Forests have provided many amenities for thousands of years – as long as humans have inhabited these spaces. How these forests have been used over time has changed in the most recent century as Indigenous uses have been marginalized or outright displaced. Indigenous uses of the forest have been greatly misunderstood, with no small coincidence because this sentiment has expeditiously facilitated others’ uses. The colonial dispossession of Indigenous lands and trade interrupted the ecologic and social harmony enjoyed by Indigenous people with enormous costs to them, to the natural resources, and colonial society. Traditional governance systems were ignored with attempts to dismantle many of them to be replaced by an imposed system created under the Indian Act, and other instruments. Differences between these systems in the governance of resource use are exemplified by the disconnect of social obligations for the stewardship of resources as is found in traditional social institutions. It is these ancient social institutions in the Pacific Northwest that social reproduction transmits the Indigenous knowledge of resources and the power of law.
Dr. Teresa (Sm’hayetsk) Ryan, Ts’msyen; Indigenous Knowledge Lecturer, UBC Faculty of Forestry
Bio:
Dr. Teresa (Sm’hayetsk) Ryan (Ts’msyen; Indigenous Knowledge Lecturer, UBC Forestry) is an ecologist specializing in Indigenous stewardship of natural resources and their interdependent connections within complex adaptive systems. She works at the forefront of forestry research to reconcile Indigenous values in projects, practices, and informing policy. Teresa is investigating relationships between salmon and healthy forests and revitalizing traditional Indigenous stewardship in the Salmon Forest Project (funded by Donner Canadian Foundation). She also works on Mother Tree Project (Simard) and is exploring old growth forests in supporting biodiversity and resiliency. Visit Teresa’s TEDxBerkley talk to hear the inspiration to her journey.
