October 31, 2019: IRES Student Seminar with Vikas Menghwani and Maayan Kreitzman

IRES Seminar Series

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

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

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*** CLICK HERE TO VIEW RECORDING (Vikas 6:35-33:21 ) (Maayan 35:08-1:02:35)***

Perceived Grid Uncertainty as an Impediment to Transition: Visualizing Low Carbon Investment Risk in Tanzania

Using Tanzania as a case, this study explores the impact of uncertainties around grid expansion on DG investments.

Meeting SDG 7 (universal energy access) requires significant investment in renewable energy based Distributed Generation (DG) systems. However, the investment environment for DG systems in developing countries is not without high risks. One of the risks DG faces is uncertainty around grid extension. Using Tanzania as a case, this study explores the following questions: i) What is the impact of perceived uncertainties (based on optimistic/pessimistic public perceptions) around grid expansion on DG investments? ii) How do competing technology investments under uncertainty change the spatial pattern of technology diffusion

Vikas Menghwani

IRES PhD Program

Bio:

Vikas is a PhD candidate at IRES, working with Dr. Hisham Zerriffi since Fall 2014. His work includes energy systems modelling for energy access, and the theoretical domains of transitions and energy justice. He completed his Mechanical Engineering (with a Masters degree in Energy Technology) education in 2009 from Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He worked in the area of climate change consulting for 3 years, covering renewable energy and energy efficiency projects across India and South East Asia, followed by 2 years in the area of business research.

Perennial polycultures in the US Midwest: environmental and food production outcomes

Perennial polyculture farming is management that integrates multiple woody perennial crops in the same field. Such enterprises on a commercial scale in the temperate North are not well studied. Can perennial polyculture offer a viable alternative for food production? This study gathered original primary data on multiple ecosystem service proxies (soil properties, insects, birds, vegetation) and food production in a paired observational study design in the US Midwest. Perennial fields show significantly higher total soil carbon and active carbon, and less soil compaction in the top soil layer (0-15 cm) than paired conventional annual cropland. They have comparable or higher N and P levels. Perennial fields also had significantly higher bird, insect, and soil fungus diversity, and more non-crop vegetative plant cover and diversity. Food production (calories) from perennial fields was significantly lower, but nutritional diversity was higher. Perennial polyculture farms in the US Midwest’s numerous environmental and nutritional benefits must be weighed against their lower yields.

Maayan Kreitzman

IRES PhD Program

Bio:

Maayan is a PhD candidate at IRES. She’s a graduate of the UBC Biology program (BSc. Biology) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (MSc. Genetics). She worked at the BC Cancer Agency’s Genome Sciences Centre as a bioinformatician before returning to UBC to start her PhD. Maayan’s research focuses on perennial crops, perennial agriculture landscapes, and their environmental and agronomic outcomes. She is also a coordinator with Extinction Rebellion Vancouver.

October 24, 2019: IRES Professional Development Seminar with Vicki Lynne George

IRES Seminar Series

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

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

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*** Note: This seminar will not be recorded***

Truth BEFORE Reconciliation

Vicki is the Assistant Director, Programming at the First Nations House of Learning, UBC. She is a truth-teller and a frequent guest speaker at various events on Indigenous topics, and is a consultant on Indigenous cultural awareness training, Indigenous and colonial history, and advancing Indigenous initiatives in companies and post-secondary institutions. Vicki will provide an overview of the political and legal landscape in BC and Canada as well as Truth and Reconciliation processes. Our work towards Truth and Reconciliation today will affect generations to come. We need to learn about Canada’s true history regarding its treatment of Indigenous peoples since European contact. We need to understand what it is that we are trying to reconcile and that only comes with being truthful first, doing our own homework, learning, listening and being respectful with each other as we navigate, at times, very difficult discussions.

Vicki Lynne George

Assistant Director, Programming, UBC First Nations House of Learning

Bio:

Vicki is from the Wet’suwet’en Nation. She is trained in the legal, executive and corporate world with over 23 years of experience.

Born and raised in the lower mainland, Vicki continues to stay connected with her Indigenous roots and extended family members in Northern BC. She understands the importance of carrying on the work of her parents and family relating to Indigenous issues.

Her father, Ron George, was a prominent Indigenous leader and her late mother, Phyllis, worked at key Indigenous organizations. Vicki grew up with law, politics and history discussions around the dinner table. Her parents’ knowledge and teachings enable Vicki to continue their work and achievements in today’s world.

Vicki developed and produced “The Constitution Express: A Multimedia History” (2005-2006), a joint project with UBC’s First Nations Studies program and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs. Generational activism has deep roots for Vicki. Her father was a key participant and organizer in the Constitution Express, and Vicki’s multimedia project started an archive for this historical movement that resulted in Section 35 being included in the Canadian Constitution. To date, Vicki’s project is still the only published and significant work on this extraordinary Indigenous history. This university project led to her being a documentary subject in the film “The Road Forward”, (released 2017) written and directed by Marie Clements. Vicki has screened “The Road Forward” film around BC to further Truth and Reconciliation education in companies, universities and at film festivals.

Vicki is a guest speaker at companies and universities in the lower mainland, including Vancity Savings Credit Union, National Film Board, Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia. She also applies her knowledge and experience with consultation services that includes Indigenous cultural awareness training, history and advancing initiatives in companies and post-secondary institutions. Vicki builds bridges and works at improving relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to move forward with Truth and Reconciliation.

October 17, 2019: IRES Faculty Seminar with Sieglinde Snapp

IRES Seminar Series

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

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

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*** VIEW SEMINAR RECORDING (Audio begins at 4:17min)***

Action research tackles the ‘wicked’ sustainability problem of agricultural intensification

Abstract:

Agricultural development is facing a sustainability crisis. Conventional science has focused on intensification pathways that support crop yield gains, at the cost of pollution, biodiversity loss and food system vulnerability. Action science offers an alternative, one that builds on client-oriented, participatory approaches to co-learning in an iterative manner. This talk will draw on decades of agroecology action research in Malawi to explore an alternative to reductionist, conventional approaches. Beyond enhancement of adaptive capacity, refined agroecology principles of diversification and slow processes were identified. Agricultural system performance for multiple domains was enhanced through functional trait complementarity and redundancy. We found evidence for a ‘goldilocks’ semi-perennial growth type as an overlooked form of crop diversity. Multipurpose, shrubby food legumes was a goldilocks innovation that was a farmer preferred means to recouple carbon and nutrient cycles and improve yield stability. Come learn about participatory action research on agroecology, for novel alternatives to annual-centric intensification of crops.

Sieglinde Snapp

Professor, Michigan State University, Department of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences

Bio:

Sieglinde Snapp is a Professor of Soils and Cropping Systems Ecology, Assoc. Director, Center for Global Change Earth Observations at Michigan State University, and Senior Advisor to Innovation Systems for the Drylands, ICRISAT. She is ‘Mother of the Mother and Baby Trial’, used in dozens of countries as a participatory action approach to improve research relevance. Through interdisciplinary, open-access science, her team has helped shape agricultural policy in Malawi, flagged declines in soil productivity, and identified overlooked forms of crop diversity for sustainable food systems: http://globalchangescience.org/eastafricanode. She is an Agronomy Fellow and a Soil Science Fellow, and received the ASA International Service Award.

Website: https://www.canr.msu.edu/people/snapp

Note:

Sieglinde Snapp is also an International Visiting Research Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

October 10, 2019: IRES Student Seminar with Evan Bowness and Abhishek Kar

IRES Seminar Series

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

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

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*** CLICK HERE TO VIEW RECORDING (Abhishek 3:58-33:50 ) (Evan 35:40-1:05:04)***

Using Photography and Videography for Community-Engaged Socio-ecological Research

Community-engaged research depends on building relationships with community partners and making scholarly work more relevant to broader publics. These are not ‘auxiliary objectives’ above and beyond traditional academic ones – they are fundamental to the research process. To this end, a trend towards transformative and transdisciplinary scholarship has brought about methodologies that prioritize reciprocity and research relevance. One example from the SSHRC lexicon is “research-creation,” where research happens alongside creative production, such as videography and photography. Both can be useful in community-engaged research: 1) As a research tool (to answer research questions); 2) as a partnership-building tool (to support research partners); and 3) as a knowledge mobilization tool (to share research results). Drawing on my work, I will give some examples of each and discuss opportunities and challenges to making community-engaged research (and research in general) more visual.

Evan Bowness

IRES PhD Program

Bio:

Evan is a PhD candidate at IRES, UBC Public Scholar and visual sociologist working with Hannah Wittman. His dissertation project titled ‘Food Sovereignty and the City: A Visual Agroecology of Urban Agrarianism in Canada and Brazil’ takes an urban political ecology approach and uses visual methods to advance our understanding of the urbanization of the food sovereignty movement. Evan is also an amateur photographer and videographer and he teaches at the University of Manitoba’s Department of Sociology.

Applying the transtheoretical model of change to cooking energy transition: Findings and implications

About 2.9 billion people rely on solid fuels (e.g. firewood and coal) in polluting primitive cookstoves with significant societal, environmental and health burden. Cooking energy transition is considered as a technology switch from solid fuels to clean cooking fuels like electricity and gas. However, it involves a host of individual behavior changes in the process of embracing new technology. We apply the transtheoretical model of change to LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) use in rural India for mapping the transition process and its underlying behavioral drivers.

In line with theory, we find that the cooking energy transition can be viewed as a five-stage process, wherein people in different stages have significantly different perceptions of the advantages, disadvantages, and self-confidence related to regular use of LPG. Further, perceived disadvantages emerge as more influential during the transition compared to household wealth, highlighting the need for post-adoption behavior change strategies.

Abhishek Kar

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Post-Doctoral Researcher, Columbia University

Bio:

Abhishek Kar recently completed Ph.D. in Resources, Environment and Sustainability from UBC. His post-doctoral research at the School of Public Health at Columbia University focuses on the drivers and impacts of cooking fuel choices in Ghana. Over the last twelve years, his multi-disciplinary research experience spans aerosols, human behavior, and policy analysis related to cooking energy transition in specific and energy access in general. Abhishek has co-authored fourteen peer-reviewed articles; his work was featured on the cover of Nature Energy- September 2019 issue. His research on India’s Ujjwala LPG program has been prominently covered by journalists and widely shared on social media, including by the Prime Minister of India.

October 3, 2019: IRES Faculty Seminar with Claudia Ituarte-Lima

IRES Seminar Series

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

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

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*** VIEW SEMINAR RECORDING (Audio begins at 5:11min)***

Human rights law: at the core or periphery of sustainability transformations?

Abstract:

Debates on transformations for safeguarding nature and its vital contributions to human existence and a good quality of life have intensified with the 2019 Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) global assessment and the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) negotiations on the post-2020 global biodiversity framework to be adopted in 2020. However, the concept of transformations for sustainability remains relatively vague and abstract. In this presentation, I will argue that weaving together human rights and environmental law provides an untapped potential for operationalising these transformations but only if human rights principles are re-interpreted to match systemic social-ecological challenges such as climate change and the mass extinction of species. The presentation draws on collaborative research with examples spanning from community environmental defenders for example in Mexico and Kenya, regional frameworks such as the European Timber Regulation to international science-policy fora.

Claudia Ituarte

Research Associate, IRES

Bio:

Dr. Claudia Ituarte-Lima is research associate at IRES at UBC. She is also a researcher on international law at Stockholm Resilience Centre and affiliated senior researcher at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights. For more than 15 years, she has specialized in the human rights, biodiversity and climate law nexus both in theory and practice. Her focus is on law and policy for sustainability and social justice and the transformation of international law into new governance forms at national and community levels. Her methodology ranges from extensive fieldwork especially in Africa and Latin America, to studies examining the interactions of international regimes .Claudia provides expert advise to the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Environment.

Website: https://ires.ubc.ca/person/claudia-ituarte-lima/

September 26, 2019: IRES Professional Development Seminar with Kai Chan, Amanda Giang, and Leila Harris

IRES Seminar Series

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

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

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*** Note: This seminar will not be recorded***

How to Land a Faculty Position

About:

After graduation, many graduate students will go on to hold influential and rewarding jobs in the governmental, policy, advocacy, and/or private sectors. But for those aiming to stay in academia, the competition can be fierce, with less than 25% of doctoral graduates obtaining a tenure-track faculty position. In this panel discussion, we speak with three faculty members with various perspectives on what it takes to set yourself apart when applying for — and hopefully landing — a faculty position.

Kai Chan

Professor, Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) and Institute for Oceans and Fisheries (IOF)

Bio:

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 (Connecting Human and Natural Systems), and is co-founder of CoSphere (a Community of Small-Planet Heroes). He is a UBC Killam Research Fellow; a Leopold Leadership Program fellow; a director on the board of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology; senior fellow of the Global Young Academy and of the Environmental Leadership Program; a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists; Lead Editor of the new British Ecological Society journal People and Nature; 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.

Website: http://chanslab.ires.ubc.ca/people/chan/
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=OByl3J0AAAAJ
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kai_Chan3

Amanda Giang

Assistant Professor, Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) and Department of Mechanical Engineering

Bio:

Amanda Giang is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UBC. Her research address challenges at the interface of environmental modelling and policy through an interdisciplinary lens, with a focus on air pollution and toxic chemicals. She is interested in understanding how modelling and data analytics can better empower communities and inform policy decision-making. Current projects in her research group include developing digital tools to better understand and respond to environmental injustice in Canada, evaluating the impacts of technology and policy on air quality, and exploring how different kinds of knowledge are used in environmental assessment processes.

Website (personal): www.agiang.com

Website (research group): www.leap-ires.org

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=zgHFhvoAAAAJ&hl=en

Leila Harris

Professor, Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) and Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ)

Bio:

Leila Harris is a Professor at the Institute for Resources Environment and Sustainability (IRES) and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia. She also serves as Co-Director for UBC’s Program on Water Governance (www.watergovernance.ca), is a member of the EDGES research collaborative (Environment and Development: Gender, Equity, and Sustainability Perspectives, www.edges.ubc.ca), and is an Associate of the Department of Geography, and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC. Dr. Harris’s work examines social, cultural, political-economic, institutional and equity dimensions of environmental and resource issues. Her current research focuses on the intersection of environmental issues and inequality / social difference, water governance shifts (e.g. marketization, participatory governance), in addition to a range of water governance challenges important for the Canadian context (e.g. First Nations water governance). Current projects include a SSHRC funded project on everyday access and governance of water in underserved areas of Cape Town, South Africa and Accra, Ghana. Dr. Harris is also principal investigator for the SSHRC funded International WaTERS Research and Training Network focused on water governance, equity and resilience in the global South (www.international-waters.org).

Dr. Joanne Fox teaches a class at Orchard Commons

Photo credit: Paul H. Joseph / UBC Brand & Marketing

September 19, 2019: IRES Faculty Seminar with Daniel Steel

IRES Seminar Series

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

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

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*** VIEW SEMINAR RECORDING (Audio begins at 8:19min)***

Climate Change and the Collapse of Civilization: How Serious is the Risk?

Abstract:

In his address to the 24th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2018, renowned nature documentarian Sir David Attenborough warned, “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.” In a similar vein, climate scientist Kevin Anderson, referring to a projection of global mean temperature by 2100 given business as usual, writes, “there is a widespread view that a 4°C future is incompatible with any reasonable characterisation of an organised, equitable and civilised global community.” Yet surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the question of how seriously one should take such warnings. In this lecture, Dr. Steel examines conceptual, epistemic, and moral issues relevant to assessing the risk that climate change might lead to civilization collapse.

Daniel Steel

Associate Professor, School of Population and Public Health

Bio:

Dr. Steel is Associate Professor in the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics in the School of Population and Public Health. His research focuses on values and science in the context of environmental and public health issues. Dr. Steel is also the author of Philosophy and the Precautionary Principle: Science, Evidence and Environmental Policy (2015 Cambridge University Press). Current research includes SSHRC funded projects on concepts of diversity their relevance to science and public engagement with health policy decisions.

Website: http://www.spph.ubc.ca/person/daniel-steel/

September 12, 2019: IRES Faculty Seminar with Claire Kremen

IRES Seminar Series

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

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

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*** VIEW SEMINAR RECORDING (Audio begins at 2:58min)***

Designing Landscapes That Work for People and Nature

Claire Kremen will discuss why conservation in working lands is needed to complement and enhance the effectiveness of protected areas, describe several agricultural case studies where working lands conservation appears successful, and discuss meta-analysis results, barriers to adoption and potential solutions through community engagement.

Claire Kremen

Professor, UBC Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability and Zoology

President’s Excellence Chair in Biodiversity

Bio:

Claire Kremen is President’s Excellence Chair In Biodiversity with a joint appointment in IRES and Zoology at University of British Columbia. She is an ecologist and applied conservation biologist working on how to reconcile agricultural land use with biodiversity conservation. Current research questions in her lab include: How do different forms of agricultural land management influence long-term persistence of wildlife populations by promoting or curtailing dispersal movements and population connectivity? Specifically, can diversified, agroecological farming systems promote species dispersal and survival? How do different types of farming systems affect ecosystem services, yields, profitability, sustainability and livelihoods? How do we design sustainable landscapes that promote biodiversity while providing for people? Before coming to UBC, she held faculty appointments first at Princeton University and then at University of California, Berkeley, where she was also founding Faculty Director for the Center for Diversified Farming Systems and the Berkeley Food Institute. Prior to those appointments, she worked for over a decade for the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Xerces Society, designing protected area networks and conducting biodiversity research in Madagascar, a biodiversity hotspot. Her work both then and now strives to develop practical conservation solutions while adding fundamentally to biodiversity science. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Conservation International, Field Chief Editor for Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, and, since 2014, has been noted as a highly-cited researcher (Thomson-Reuters’ “World’s Most Influential Minds”/Clarivate Analytics).

September 5, 2019: IRES Faculty Seminar with Tahia Devisscher

IRES Seminar Series

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

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

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*** VIEW SEMINAR RECORDING***

Anticipating and managing future wildfire risk in southern Amazonia: A social-ecological systems analysis

Abstract:

Wildfire risk in southern Amazonia is rapidly increasing as a result of deforestation, spreading use of fire, and climate change. Using a novel social-ecological systems analysis, I studied wildfire dynamics in this region and ways to anticipate future risk under different climatic and developmental conditions. The analysis adopts a multi-scalar approach, integrates different scientific disciplines, and builds on multiple forms of knowledge and understandings of fire. Insights are generated through ground-based studies in two specific sites looking at fine-grained social and ecological dynamics of wildfire, combined with remote sensing assessing coarse-grained spatial dynamics driving fire risk at the regional level. Methods include simulation modelling, geospatial analysis, ecological surveys, focus group discussions, observation and semi-structured interviews. Findings inform important ecological, social, and landscape governance recommendations needed for more resilient, adaptive and inclusive forest management strategies in the context of climate change.

Tahia Devisscher

Postdoctoral Fellow, Forest Resource Management

Bio:

Dr Tahia Devisscher has ten years of international experience working at the interface of environment and development. In her work, Tahia adopts systems thinking and interdisciplinarity to integrate traditional knowledge with scientific data, and assess possible climate adaptation strategies based on ecosystem management. Tahia has a PhD from the University of Oxford (UK), and is a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of British Columbia (Canada). Currently, she is investigating the extent to which urban forests increase social-ecological resilience to climate change, and improve the way in which urban residents relate to, benefit from, and engage with nature.

Spotlight: https://www.postdocs.ubc.ca/spotlight/tahia-devisscher

Jiaying Zhao promoted to Associate Professor

Congratulations to Dr. Jiaying Zhao who has been promoted to Associate Professor!

What is psychology good for? How can psychology contribute to sustainability? To answer these questions, Dr. Zhao aims to use psychological principles to design behavioral solutions to address sustainability challenges. This approach offers insights on how cognitive mechanisms govern human behavior, and how behavioral interventions can inform the design and the implementation of public policy. Dr. Zhao is currently examining the cognitive causes and consequences of scarcity, what behavioral interventions improve the performance in low-income individuals, how to promote recycling and composting behavior, water and energy conservation, what cognitive, motivational, and sociocultural factors shape the perception of climate change, and how to engage the public on biodiversity conservation.

Website: http://zhaolab.psych.ubc.ca
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=w6d1YTgAAAAJ&hl=en

For more on Dr. Zhao’s current work and publications, see here.

UBC RESEARCHERS AMONG NEW AND RENEWED CANADA RESEARCH CHAIRS