Among the numerous ecosystem services provided by wetlands climate regulation is identified as one of their most important benefits to society. Wetland ecosystems play an important role in the global carbon cycle; they provide the ideal environment for long-term storage of atmospheric CO2, yet they are also the largest single source of methane. Climate change could increase greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from wetlands, however, the consequences of rising temperatures on wetland GHG exchange remains uncertain. Furthermore, preventing further wetland loss and restoring wetland ecosystems has been identified as important in limiting future emissions to help meet climate goals. This talk presents research that combines field-based measurements, remote sensing, and modelling to provide new insights into the controls of wetland GHG fluxes across a range of spatial and temporal scales and quantify the potential climate benefits of wetland restoration and conservation.
Dr. Sara Knox, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography
Bio:
Dr. Sara Knox is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. She received a B.Sc. in Earth System Science from McGill University, a M.Sc. in Geography from Carleton University, and a Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy and Management from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Knox leads the integrated GHG Research and Observations in Wetlands (iGROW) research program, which takes an interdisciplinary approach to provide a better understanding of how wetland responses to climate variability and restoration can feedback to slow or accelerate future climate change.
Agriculture is at the centre of society’s most pressing challenges, including food insecurity, climate change, and labour inequity. Organic agriculture, when practiced according to an ethic grounded in ecology, health, fairness, and care, has been proposed as a remedy to these challenges. However, there remain significant gaps in knowledge about how organic agriculture is practiced relative to the principles on which it was founded, especially the principle of fairness. Drawing from interviews, census data, surveys, and organic policy documents, I investigate how organic agriculture is shaped and enacted by organic community members at multiple scales to assess its contributions to fairness with a focus on labour. I found little evidence that organic certification translates to improved conditions for farmworkers in practice. At the same time, governance and social movement efforts show potential to advance a more just and sustainable agriculture.
Susanna Klassen, RES PhD Candidate
Bios:
Susanna is a PhD candidate at IRES and is co-supervised by Hannah Wittman and Navin Ramankutty. She is an interdisciplinary social scientist, and her doctoral dissertation looks at the contributions of organic agriculture to socio-ecological sustainability and fairness, with a focus on food policy, agroecological diversification, labour and justice. Susanna holds a BSc from McGill University and a MSc from UBC’s Faculty of Land and Food Systems. She lives on the traditional territory of the Tla’amin Nation on the lower Sunshine Coast of BC.
In city planning documents, the City of Vancouver’s eastern neighbourhoods are often mapped as “equity zones” and as “areas in need of resources.” With higher climate hazard risk (e.g., sea level rise) and higher socioeconomic vulnerability (e.g., low-income), these equity zones have become high-priority areas for improvements, such as green infrastructure (GI) solutions like street trees and rain gardens. In this research, I turn to Vancouver’s equity zones and ask: what are residents’ self-identified GI priorities, challenges, and aspirations? Two participatory workshops were hosted with residents who live in equity zones. Participants shared how GI projects can be adapted to meet their needs as renters, immigrants, low-income individuals, and families. Second, participants stressed that improved liveability (namely through public transit and affordable housing) can improve their experience with GI.
Taya Triffo, RES MA Student
Taya Triffo is a Master of Arts student with IRES (supervised by Dr. Leila Harris). She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the University of Regina, convocating with great distinction and the President’s Medal. Taya is interested in how communities work together to articulate and envision resource transformations. She has participated in advocacy for the 100% Renewable Regina project — both as a community facilitator and as a policy researcher. She has also worked with the Regina Qu’Appelle Health Region, University of Regina’s Community Engagement and Research Centre, and the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture.
Implementing an operational-level grievance mechanism is considered an effective remedy to address human rights violations that a business may commit. In accordance with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, these mechanisms can support the identification and remediation of adverse human rights violations. Barrick Gold Corporation, first through its affiliate Acacia Mining and then on its own, has managed an operational-level grievance mechanism to address the violence and other human rights violations alleged by local communities near its North Mara mine in Tanzania. Since its implementation, the mechanism has been criticized for falling short of international standards and failing to redress community grievances. This presentation will discuss the history and shortcomings of Barrick Gold’s grievance mechanism, with a particular focus on how corporate control over human rights violations at the mine has transformed elements of Tanzania’s approach to mining governance.
Dr. Sara Ghebremusse, Assistant Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law
Bio:
Dr. Sara Ghebremusse is an Assistant Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law. She writes, researches, and teaches in the areas of African mining, law and development, transnational law, and human rights. She has published in all these fields and has presented her research at conferences around the world. Dr. Ghebremusse is the Principal Investigator of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant-funded project examining how Canadian mining conflicts in Tanzania and Zambia have contributed to institutional transformation in the two countries. She has also supported the development of the Allard School of Law’s Executive Learning Program in Mining Law and Sustainability.
In Sept 2020, the Government of India hustled three Bills through the Parliament, in what many observers describe as a subversion of basic democratic and parliamentary procedures. These three laws were touted as a paradigm changer for the agriculture sector in the country. On the face of it, the laws appeared to steer the agriculture value chain toward a free market, implicitly acknowledging that the sector is heavily subsidized. opponents argued that the laws weakened the price guarantees that staple food crops enjoyed, removed existing regulations to prevent hoarding and price rigging and pitted powerful corporations against unorganized farmers. A majority of the critics agree that the new laws were designed to fast-track investment from large corporations. What they disagree on is whether the entry of corporations will come at the cost of farmers.
This discussion will look at the controversy from an additional angle — from a viewpoint that policy debates on agriculture and allied sectors in India (and much of the Global South) are about much more than productivity and food security. It is also about poverty reduction goals, equity, property rights and disempowerment. We will discuss how a vast majority of farmers are under-represented in the policy-making process. And how they will remain excluded despite all the hype and attention that the recent agitation garnered.
Dr. Shashidharan Enarth, Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability in the University of British Columbia
Bio:
Shashi Enarth is a development activist from India, struggling to strike a balance between academia and praxis. Starting his career as a community organizer, he has worked with low income segments of the population, particularly with farming communities in India, Nigeria and Tanzania. His area of interest is: building community-based self-governing people’s institutions that can safeguard the interests of its members through sustainable and equitable use of all forms of capital, especially natural and human resources. A good part of his 25 year development career saw him struggle with implementation of development policies that mandated decentralization of fiscal, administrative and political powers against a backdrop of a political economy that is shaped by traditional institutions and forces of centralization. In the process, he got involved in policy research and advocacy initiatives through NGOs in India and as a consultant to The World Bank in Africa. His current research interests, therefore, focusses on understanding barriers to equity and sustainability in the geo-political context of developing economies. Before taking the current sabbatical, he was a senior member of BASIX Social Enterprise Group, an Indian conglomeration of 15 organizations working on a mission to promote large scale sustainable livelihoods.
Shashi is a trained social worker who returned to school to do a PhD that explored the relationship between the processes of decentralization and democratization and its impact on good governance. He is an IRES/UBC Alumni, during the days of RMES!
An Archaeological Perspective and Anti-colonial Approach to Forest History in Laxyuubm Ts’msyen and Beyond
Time: 12:30pm to 1:20pm
Location: Beaty Museum Theatre (2212 Main Mall)
Email communications@ires.ubc.ca for video.
Talk summary:
Land-use scientists increasingly recognize that ecological and anthropogenic forces have long interacted in complex ways, forming many of the landscapes we observe today. In the Pacific Northwest, historical Indigenous land-use and forest management has resulted in forest gardens: ecosystems dominated by edible fruit, nut, and berry producing trees and shrubs, managed by Indigenous peoples in the past and which continue to grow today. This presentation will provide an overview of forest garden research in collaboration with Ts’msyen, Sts’ailes, and Nuchatlaht Nations, focusing on archaeological and historical-ecological methods and data. Anti-colonial perspectives are explored as a means of centralizing Indigenous sovereignty and practice (action) while challenging ongoing colonial/extractive dynamics in scientific research.
Dr. Chelsey Armstrong, Settler scholar and assistant professor in Indigenous Studies at Simon Fraser University Director of the Historical and Ecological Research Lab
Bio:
Dr. Armstrong is a historical ecologist and archaeologist specializing in ancient human land-use in the Pacific Northwest. She is a settler scholar and assistant professor in Indigenous Studies at Simon Fraser University, and director of the Historical and Ecological Research Lab.
How to create record-breaking wildfire seasons in BC: A reflection on recent megafires and their drivers
Location: Beaty Museum Allan Yap Theatre (Basement, 2212 Main Mall). Please speak with the Admin desk on the main floor before going down to the Theatre.
British Columbia is smashing wildfire records. The years 2017, 2018, 2021 and 2023 were the four most severe and costly wildfire seasons of the last century. What drives these large, intense, and uncontrollable megafires? Social media is swirling with conspiracy theories about ecoterrorists, arsonists, and lasers from space. In reality, wildfire is driven by climate, weather, and fuels that vary among ecosystems in mountainous landscapes and through time. Global warming, superimposed on a century of colonization land-use change, fire exclusion, and industrial forest management have made many forests highly susceptible to intense fires that exceed modern technologies for control and spread to large sizes with extreme impacts. Revolutionizing forest and fire management will improve ecosystem resilience to climate change, but we will not stop future fires from burning. To successfully adapt, our society must learn to coexist with wildfire
Dr. Lori Daniels, Professor, UBC Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences
Bio:
Dr. Lori Daniels is a Professor of Forest Ecology in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, where she directs the Tree-Ring Lab at UBC. Lori investigates the impacts of natural and human disturbances and climate change on forests. With her research team, she has on-going projects on wildfires, forest dynamics, and social-ecological resilience to climate change across British Columbia. Her enduring partnerships with local, provincial, and national governments, environmental organizations, forest management companies, community forests, and First Nations ensure her scientific advances are translated to active conservation, restoration and management. She contributed to the Blueprint for Wildland Fire Science in Canada and served as a member of the Canadian Wildfire Strategy Implementation Team and the NSERC-Canada Wildfire Research Network. Since 2015, she has given more than 200 media interviews on wildfires and their impacts on forests and communities. She is among the 150 Canadian Scientists recognized in 2017 for research shaping new frontiers and making our world a better place (#150Scientists). She was acknowledged as a Women Leader in international fire science research in 2018, received the 2019 Canadian Institute of Forestry Scientific Achievement Award, the 2022 James J. Parsons Distinguished Career in Biogeography Award from the American Association of Geographers and the 2023 Distinguished Researcher Award from the Association of Fire Ecologists.
As the majority of Canada obtains its drinking water from forested watersheds, forest management to better manage the effects of land use changes related to industries such as logging and urban development are of high public interest. To understand impacts on aquatic ecosystems from land use change it is essential to understand how carbon is cycled, transported, and stored throughout the ecosystem. Aquatic ecosystem metabolism (AEM), a key component of carbon cycling, can be evaluated by determining gross primary productivity (GPP) and respiration (R) within the water column of streams, rivers, lakes, and wetlands. AEM controls energy and material flow through aquatic ecosystems therefore linking environmental change and food webs to provide a useful framework for examining ecosystem function and productivity. The objective of this research is to investigate the role of AEM as a control on carbon transport, turnover, and fate in forested ecosystems under varying land use and streamflow conditions. I used sensors to measure dissolved oxygen to determine AEM on a continuous basis for a single stream. The study was conducted in the University of British Columbia (UBC) Malcolm Knapp Research Forest (MKRF) located approximately 50 km east of Vancouver, BC containing forested and harvested catchments.
Trisa Ngo, IRES MSc Student
Bio:
Trisa is a MSc student in IRES supervised by Dr. Mark Johnson. She is part of the UBC Ecohydrology Lab where her research focuses on the impacts of land-use changes to water quality and aquatic metabolism in the UBC Malcolm Knapp Research Forest. Her broader research interests include water security, watershed science, and resource management. Currently, Trisa lives and works as an environmental scientist in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories where she was born and raised; as a result, she is also interested in northern research topics that contribute to improving and increasing the state of knowledge in the North.
Talk summary:
As of 2020, Saskatchewan leads the country in highest per capita GHG emissions. It was also the only province to have immediately and unremittingly rejected the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change which hinged on a national plan for pricing carbon. Despite widespread advocation for carbon pricing from economists and evidence of success in other jurisdictions, there is strong opposition to the federal carbon tax in Saskatchewan among the general public and the governing Saskatchewan Party. One means for Saskatchewan politicians to share their views on the matter is via Twitter (recently renamed X) – a platform they may use to speak directly to voters. In this study I explore how Saskatchewan politicians, at both the federal and provincial levels, have used Twitter as a tool to discuss and frame the federal carbon tax. This presentation highlights the tweet content analysis that was performed and the results of this study that find, due to the silence of alleged supporters, there was almost no defense of the carbon tax from Saskatchewan’s own elected officials on Twitter.
Grace Schaan, IRES MA Student
Bio:
Grace Schaan is a MA student in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability and is supervised by Dr. Kathryn Harrison. Grace is interested in researching policy for climate change and explores in her master’s thesis how politicians frame the federal carbon tax. She is also researching the impacts of BC’s provincial legislation on climate action at universities as a Sustainability Scholar with the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions and the UBC Sustainability Hub.
Grace completed a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies at the University of Regina in 2020. Prior to joining IRES, she worked for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in the National Agroclimate Information Service. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, camping, and listening to live music.
The Climate Emergency and the Future of Global Food Trade Governance
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.
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:
Food systems are a key driver of climate change and climate change poses significant threats to the stability of world food production. International food trade can enable markets to respond to food supply shocks; however, existing global food trade rules may constrain the policy space of states to enhance food system resilience to climate-induced shocks. While World Trade Organization (WTO) rules are designed to maximize economic efficiency and discourage overproduction, they may also limit states’ capacity to insure against global production shocks through public food stockholding.
Dr.Matias E. Margulis,Associate Professor, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs & Faculty of Land and Food Systems
Bio:
Matias E. Margulis is Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia. His research interests span international trade, development, and food security. His most recent book is Shadow Negotiators: How UN Organizations Shape the Rules of World Trade for Food Security (Stanford University Press, 2023).
For system change to confront the Climate-and-Ecological Crisis.
In response to a culture that suppresses transformative efforts and visions, we need to #UnleashValues for a sustainable future. Join a webinar hosted by CoSphere to learn how easy it can be to amplify pro-sustainability values!
