January 30 2018 Tuesday: IRES Special Seminar
Speaker: David Rutledge

January 30 2018 Tuesday: IRES Special Seminar
Speaker: David Rutledge

IRES Seminar Series

Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (TUESDAY)

Location: AERL 107,  2202 Main Mall

***************************************************************************

 

Energy Resources for Climate Models

David Rutledge, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, CA

Abstract: In modeling climate change, the carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the most important factor.  The time frame for the climate response is much longer than the time frame for burning fossil fuels, and this means the total amount burned is more important than the burn rate.  Production of oil, gas, and coal in the long run is traditionally estimated from government geological surveys, together with an allowance for future discoveries of oil and gas.  Where these estimates can be tested, they have tended to be too high. In the latest IPCC climate assessment report, carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in the business-as-usual scenario do not decline until after 2150. In this paper, I will show that there is little historical evidence that supports this assumption of enormous resources. This may allow a “Goldilocks” outcome, slow enough to allow the development of alternative energy, but fast enough to mitigate climate impacts.

This seminar will not be filmed.

 

 

Bio: Professor Rutledge is the Tomiyasu Professor of Engineering at Caltech, and a former Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science there. He is a founder of the Wavestream Corporation, a manufacturer of transmitters for satellite uplinks.  He is a winner of the Teaching Award of the Associated Students at Caltech and a Fellow of the IEEE.

 

Note that this event is happening on TUESDAY, not Thursday. 

 

Photo Credit: RWE from flickr/ Creative Commons

March 29, 2018: IRES Faculty Seminar
Speaker: Laura Morillas

IRES Seminar Series

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

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

**************************************************************************

Resilience of natural and managed landscapes under increasing water scarcity and climate change

Abstract: Increasing water scarcity resulting from climate change and raising water global demand is one of the major challenges that ecosystems and humans are facing in the 21st century.  Research should provide answers to some crucial questions derived from this challenge: How will natural ecosystems respond to changing climatic conditions? What shifts can be predicted on the landscape as a result? How sustainably is water being used to feed humans? What can be done to reduce the water footprint of humanity? In an attempt to find some answers to those big questions, Dr. Morillas will discuss her past and present research regarding the resiliency of increasingly threaten natural and agricultural systems. Two study cases will be presented: 1) Piñon-Juniper woodlands in Southwestern USA affected by drought-driven tree mortality, and 2) agricultural systems in Northwestern Costa Rica threaten by ENSO-enhanced droughts.

Bio:  Dr. Laura Morillas is a Research Associate at UBC (EOAS and IRES) currently working with Professor Mark Johnson on the Agricultural Water Innovations in the Tropics (AgWIT) project. Her work at UBC has being focused on assessing and improving resiliency of tropical agricultural systems to climate change and increasing water scarcity, including research on the FuturAgua project. Previously, Dr. Morillas was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico where she studied the eco-hydrological consequences of drought-driven forest mortality (2013-2015). She completed her PhD at the Spanish National Research Council in 2013 focused on evapotranspiration modeling on semiarid landscapes.

 

 

February 15, 2018: IRES Professional Development Seminar
To Profit or Not? How organizational structures impact sustainability projects

IRES Seminar Series

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

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

***************************************************************************

 

For-Profit vs Non-Profit Consulting Work Panel

Organizations have different missions, ranging from maximizing profit, to ideological objectives. Non-profits, private businesses, and coops all fall into different places on this spectrum.Their missions impact not just the work that they do, but also how they go about it. This seminar will convene panelists with a range of experiences in different types of organizations to explore how organizational structures shape project selection and execution in the sustainability field.

 

PANELIST:

 

Michelle Bailey (Bailey Env. Consulting) has over 10 years experience as a professional biologist, and is currently a Senior Scientist and partner at a small local firm, though she previously she spent 9 years with the global firm Stantec. Michelle has extensive experience working with the oil and gas sector with experience leading assessments and environmental monitoring, marine mammal surveys, and land use planning.

 

 

 

Esther Speck (Lululemon) is the VP of global sustainability for Lululemon Athletica.  She has held environmental advisory roles for MEC, Whistler, and run her own consulting firm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Matt Horne (City of Vancouver) has extensive experience working with both NGOs and governments.  Before joining the City of Vancouver in 2017, he spent 14 years with the Pembina institute with roles as the Associate Director in BC and the Director of the Climate Change Program.

 

 

Usman Valiante (Cardwell Grove Inc.) is a senior policy analyst and strategist with 26 years of experience in environmental science and economics, corporate strategy, public policy and regulatory design, advocacy, and communications. He has developed Extended Producer Responsibility programs and circular economy systems including those for beverage containers, pharmaceuticals, batteries and vehicles.

 

 

 

This seminar will not be filmed.

 

 

Photo Credit: Sharif Putra from flickr/ Creative Commons

January 25, 2018: IRES Professional Development Seminar
CV of Failures

IRES Seminar Series

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

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

***************************************************************************

CV of Failures

Abstract:

We all want to succeed in our careers, but what about the dark underbelly of success? We rarely expose our many failures, projecting a skewed version of reality that makes us feel isolated and embattled in the face of others’ seeming never-ending accomplishments. In this PDS, we will break the taboo of talking about our failures in order to acknowledge, understand, and perhaps even move past them. We talk to some professors in our department about the things that they don’t put on their CV. The CVs that made them better, and the ones that still haunt them.

This seminar will not be filmed.

 

Speaker Bios:

Stephanie Chang studies issues of community vulnerability and resilience to natural disasters. Her current projects focus on coastal hazard risk and resilience in British Columbia. Dr. Chang has written extensively on socio-economic impacts of disasters, and served on the U.S. National Research Council’s Committee on Disaster Research in the Social Sciences.

 

Milind Kandlikar is a Professor at the Liu Institute for Global Issues and IRES. His work focuses on the intersection of technology innovation, human development, and the global environment. In addition to being the current IRES Director, Dr. Kandlikar has published extensively on the science and policy of climate change.

 

Terre Satterfield is an interdisciplinary social scientist and professor of culture, risk, and the environment. Her research concerns sustainable thinking and action in the context of environmental management and decision making. Dr. Satterfield is also a board member or scientist for several international initiatives that seek to integrate social science research into policy analysis.

 

 

Photo credit: Chris Shade from flickr/ Creative Commons

January 4, 2018: IRES Faculty Seminar
Speaker: Jocelyn Stacey
(First Seminar for Term 2)

IRES Seminar Series

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

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

***************************************************************************

The Rule of (Environmental) Law

 

Abstract:

Environmental issues strain a central concept of western legal systems: the rule of law. The rule of law is traditionally characterized as a system of predictable, general rules enacted by the legislature. Environmental issues are complex and some contain the possibility of catastrophe. The epistemic features of environmental issues undermine our ability to govern environmental issues through predetermined legal rules. Relying on examples of the National Energy Board and Gitxaala Nation v Canada (the Northern Gateway pipeline decision), I argue that understanding the rule of law from an environmental perspective focuses our attention on legal principles, rather than rules. I argue that the rule of (environmental) law requires decision-makers to justify their decisions on the basis of deep-seated common law principles that account for our ever-present vulnerability to environmental harm.

This seminar will not be filmed.

 

Bio:

Jocelyn Stacey is an Assistant Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on Canadian environmental and administrative law. She has a doctorate in law from McGill University. Her dissertation, “The Constitution of the Environmental Emergency,” was nominated for the Governor General’s Gold Medal. She has a LLM from Yale Law School and an LLB from the University of Calgary. Professor Stacey has been the recipient of numerous academic awards including a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship for her doctoral work. Prior to graduate work, Jocelyn clerked for the Honorable Justice Marshall Rothstein at the Supreme Court of Canada.

Professor Stacey’s research focuses on the relationship between the rule of law and environmental issues. Her current work explores the potential implications of understanding environmental issues from the perspective of an ongoing emergency. A profile of her current work can be found on the Research Portal. She is a founding Board Member of the Pacific Centre for Environmental Law and Litigation, a non-profit society dedicated to training law students and young lawyers in public interest environmental law litigation.

 

Photo Credit: Isaac Kohane from flikr/ Creative Commons

April 5, 2018: No IRES Seminar

 

 

 

 

Photo Credit: John Westrock from flickr/ Creative Commons  

April 12, 2018: IRES Student Symposium Symposium

IRES Student Symposium

Thursday, April 12th 2018

Time: 1pm to 4:45pm

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

Food and Drinks: 4:45pm and onwards in the AERL lobby. Dinner with cash bar. 

Organized by the RES Student Society and RES students. 

***************************************************************************

Here are the 7 speakers presenting at the symposium with their presentation titles, summary, and biography.

1. If you build it, will they come? — Anticipating future development in Cumulative Effects Assessment 

Consideration of “reasonably foreseeable future projects” is a longstanding challenge in cumulative effects assessments. Details about future projects are often scant or non-existent, with this limitation used to justify excluding most future projects from cumulative effects assessments, though not from economic benefit evaluations. In this presentation, I argue that it is possible to better align our accounting of environmental consequences with our expectation of economic gains. To this end, I use historical development patterns to develop a statistical model of probable future development scenarios. These probability estimates can be used in lieu of current practice (of essentially ignoring future projects) to inform cumulative effects assessments, especially of project types known to have a high potential to attract further development. As a case study, I develop a probabilistic model for BC using the past 150 years of historical project development data.

Jackie Lerner (PhD Candidate):

Bio: Jackie Lerner is a PhD Candidate at UBC’s Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability. She has worked in environmental consulting for over twenty years and been involved in the preparation of environmental and social impact assessments for several major Canadian resource development projects.

 

 

2. Projecting the impacts of montane meadow restoration through groundwater modeling

Mountain meadows provide important ecosystem services and wildlife habitats across the Sierra Nevada in California.  From a hydrologic perspective, meadows can act to increase baseflow, mitigate spring flooding, and sustain niche ecosystems.  Despite these benefits, meadow systems have been severely degraded since western settlement through livestock, timber extraction, and infrastructure development. With a changing climate and limited management budgets, hydrologic modeling can offer insights into impacts from management actions.  Van Norden meadow is a large meadow near Lake Tahoe in Northern California at the top of the Upper Yuba River.  It provides a case study to better understand how restoration actions (dam removal and channel filling), and climatic shifts may affect meadow hydrology.

Teddy Eyster (MSc student):

Bio: Teddy is an MSc student studying under Mark Johnson in the Ecohydro Lab.  He is interested in water as a link between human and natural systems and works on a wide range of projects from developing open-source DIY water monitoring technology to modeling mountain meadow restoration. Teddy received his BSE in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Princeton University and has worked as an environmental consultant and researcher engaged in site assessments, contaminant mapping, groundwater monitoring, and fieldwork in ecology and hydrology. In his spare time, he enjoys trail running, playing banjo, woodworking, and throwing the atlatl.

 

 

3.  Using Network Science to Understand the Knowledge Translation Pathways that Support Evidence Informed Decision Making in Learning Health Systems.

Evidence-informed public policy has demonstrated positive outcomes for populations. Within the health sector, evidence-informed decision-making (EIDM) suggests that knowledge generated from scientific research will support better policy, and knowledge translation (KT) is intended to facilitate this process. This interdisciplinary strategy uses network science concepts from epidemiology, in two applications, to understand the KT pathways as contagion phenomena in environments that use evidence to inform health policy.

At the macro- level, bibliometric analyses are used to understand the global trends in international collaboration with in health policy and systems research (HPSR). At the micro-level, a survey was conducted in a public health agency with an embedded policy support research mandate. The survey captured the informal interpersonal networks among employees and these results were used to demonstrate the complex pathways along which research knowledge flows within the organization.

Seminar video not available.

Krista English (PhD Candidate):

Bio: I am a PhD Candidate with an interest in topics at the intersection of complex systems, health systems and decision-making, and their general relationship with organizational complexity and public health policy design.

I am currently a Senior Research Scientist and Co-investigator on a 5-year CIHR operating grant in IRES. Prior to this, I have worked in population and public health research and management for more than a decade, at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, most recently as the Associate Director of the Division of Mathematical Modeling. I concurrently served a 4-year term as Co-Director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre in Complexity Science for Health Systems.

 

 

4. Public Perceptions of Farming Systems and Associated Practices

Designing agricultural systems that balance food production with environmental sustainability will be pivotal in supporting a growing population while living within planetary boundaries. While there are many different aspects of the global food system from which significant change can be made, the consumer role is one dimension that warrants examination, and is the aim of this research. Understanding the relationship between consumer attitudes and actions relating to food is one piece of the greater puzzle of actualizing the shift towards a sustainable food system. Forming a complete understanding of how consumers influence the food system is an important step toward achieving change. This study thus seeks to explore the intuitive logics that people use to judge different food systems, their associated agricultural practices, and other variables that go into the decision-making process with agrifood products.

Seminar Video not available. 

Rae Cramer (MA Student):

Bio: Rae is an MA student working under the supervision of Dr. Terre Satterfield and Dr. Jiaying Zhao. Her research is focused on how perceptions of foods and farming systems affects consumer decision making. Rae completed her BA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Environmental Science and Anthropology. After graduating, different avenues of work led her to an increasing interest in sustainable agriculture and food systems.

 

 

5. Toward Decolonizing Food Literacy: Co-Creating a Curriculum at Lach Klan School with Gitxaala Nation

Food is and has always been more than a source of physical nourishment for Gitxaala Nation; it is a way of life, a source of pride and integral to community wellness. This research explores how the Gitxaala community garden and the Summer Reading Program at Lach Klan School can be leveraged to provide a platform for learning – ‘food literacy’ – as a pathway toward achieving the broader goals of food security and food sovereignty. By enhancing the engagement of students in Gitxaala with their food system through hands-on learning activities that integrate Indigenous language and knowledge, this research suggests that food literacy activities have the potential to contribute to the goals of food sovereignty in Gitxaala by better equipping students to define, demand and make decisions that shape what their food system looks like now and into the future.

Seminar video not available.

Ada Smith (MA Student):

Bio: Ada grew up on a small farmstead in rural Wisconsin where her family’s vegetable patch was surrounded by endless rows of corn and soybeans, sparking her interest in questions around food security, food sovereignty and food literacy. She completed her BA in Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Wellesley College where her honors thesis focused on food security and environmental justice on the small island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. Her current research as an MA Candidate at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at UBC expands upon her academic interests and real-world experiences in seeking to understand what key components or mechanisms are needed to successfully “operationalize” food sovereignty for remote First Nations communities in BC.

 

 

6. Understanding Carsharing Patterns for Effective TDM Policymaking: A Study of Municipalities in Metro Vancouver

Carsharing (CS) is a method of individual transportation more sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective than personal automobile ownership. Cities worldwide are exploring policies intended to encourage CS access and utilization with the goal of improving urban planning and human health through transportation sustainability. There is a need to understand and explain CS usage patterns to improve existing municipal policies.  This thesis surveys municipal policies for promotion of CS around Metro Vancouver.  A broadly held perception has emphasized the importance of CS vehicle visibility as critical to recruitment of members and utilization of vehicles. This belief is tested against visibility metrics and found to neither explain recruitment patterns nor utilization rates.  Additional data is gathered to partially explain observed patterns of CS membership recruitment patterns and vehicle utilization and their adoption as part of the menu of municipal policymaking for transportation demand management.

 Arielle Swett (MA Student):

 

Bio: Arielle Swett is a Master’s student in IRES with a background in public policy and international affairs. Within the policy realm, her expertise lies in federal and state energy policies, renewable portfolio standards, utility environmental compliance plans, and conventional electricity supply auctions throughout ISOs in the Northeastern and Midwest United States. At IRES she works with Drs. Hadi Dowlatabadi and Jiaying Zhao as part of a carsharing research team investigating various aspects of carsharing behaviours and policies in the Metro Vancouver region.

 

 

7. The role of Indigenous women in transforming fisheries governance

While the agency of individuals has been identified as a key factor in triggering governance transformations in social-ecological systems, little research has explored how the social position of the actors involved influence these transformation processes. My thesis contributes to an expanded understanding of these processes based on work that examines how Indigenous women positioned themselves and responded during a recent fishery crisis and conflict which led to changes in the management of Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) on the Central Coast of British Columbia. Through qualitative inquiry, I identified actions taken by Heiltsuk women that unified their community, created intergenerational solidarity and movement towards transforming fisheries governance. The findings of this study underscore the importance of Indigenous women as agents of change in their communities and that their leadership roles must be recognized and supported to navigate towards natural resource sustainability and social justice, globally, as well as reconciliation, nationally.

Sarah Harper (PhD Candidate) : 

Bio: At the intersection of gender, fisheries, and economics, Sarah’s thesis work investigates the contributions by women to fisheries economies around the world. Her research is interdisciplinary and involves using both quantitative and qualitative approaches to identify women in the fisheries sector, their role and participation in fishing and related activities, including governance, at the local, national, and global level. Her project aims to raise the profile of women in fisheries by providing empirical evidence of the substantial contributions women make to fisheries economies in terms of labour and catch with implications for food and livelihood security and sustainability. A secondary goal of this research is to provide information necessary for developing fisheries policies that are more equitable and gender-sensitive.

 

The Student Symposium video:  IRES Student Symposium_4/12/2018

 

 

David Boyd, IRES Associate Professor, in the news

David Boyd, an Associate Professor at IRES on Law, Policy and Sustainability, has been in several recent news articles around Vancouver on the the needs for nature to have legal rights in Canada. You can find the articles in the links below.

Metro News: http://www.metronews.ca/news/vancouver/2017/12/07/nature-needs-legal-rights-b-c-law-prof.html

Vancouver Sun: http://vancouversun.com/opinion/op-ed/david-boyd-recognizing-land-as-a-legal-person-could-help-solve-native-land-claims

The Star: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2017/10/08/tragic-consequences-of-having-of-more-starbucks-than-cheetahs.html

Time colonist: http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-should-b-c-s-killer-whales-have-legal-rights-1.23089015

Bio

Associate Professor of Law, Policy and Sustainability, IRES

David R. Boyd is an environmental lawyer and internationally renowned expert on human rights and the environment. He has a PhD in Resource Management and Environmental Studies from UBC, a JD from the University of Toronto, and a business degree from the University of Alberta. His primary focus is on identifying laws and policies that will accelerate the transition to an ecologically sustainable and just future, both in Canada and across the world. Areas of particular interest include environmental justice, environmental rights and responsibilities, the rights of nature, the debate between regulation and economic instruments, and urban environmental issues. Boyd is the author of seven books and over 100 articles on environmental issues. His most recent books include The Optimistic Environmentalist (ECW Press, 2015), Cleaner, Greener, Healthier: A Prescription for Stronger Canadian Environmental Laws and Policies (UBC Press, 2015), The Right to a Healthy Environment: Revitalizing Canada’s Constitution (UBC Press, 2012) and The Environmental Rights Revolution: A Global Study of Constitutions, Human Rights, and the Environment (UBC Press, 2012).

 

Photo Credit by Alan Stanton from flickr Creative Commons 

IRES welcomes two Visiting Professors – Bradley Eyre and Chris Barrington-Leigh!

IRES would like to announce that we will have two visiting professors with us!

Bradley Eyre

Professor Bradley Eyre is a biogeochemist and the foundation Director of the Centre for Coastal Biogeochemistry at Southern Cross University, Australia. His publications include topics such as whole ecosystem carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus budgets, net ecosystem metabolism estimates, benthic and pelagic production and respiration, dissolved organic carbon fluxes, carbon stable isotopes (fluxes and assimilation), carbon burial and air-sea GHG flux estimates, benthic denitrification, benthic habitats and seascapes, historical and ecosystem comparisons, ocean acidification, hypoxia, eutrophication, submarine groundwater discharge, permeable sands and carbonate sediment dissolution. Professor Eyre has 157 articles in Scopus listed journals (H-index = 44, Total citations >5000, Google Scholar; H-index = 35, Total citations>3500, Scopus) and has attracted over >$20 million in funding. He has mentored 14 early- and mid-career researchers and supervised 32 PhD students.

IRES Visiting Professor term: December 2017- February 2018

 

Chris Barrington-Leigh

Chris Barrington-Leigh is an Associate Professor at McGill University, jointly appointed at the Institute for Health and Social Policy and the School of Environment, and is an associate member in McGill’s Department of Economics.  One strand of Chris’ research is focused on empirical and quantitative assessments of human well-being, and their implications for economic, social, and environmental policy.  He uses large international as well as national surveys, experiments, and economic theoretical modeling to understand individual and aggregate consumption benefits, and their implications for policy, including a broad transition to sustainability. Another current strand of work aims to understand household economic and health effects of Beijing’s rural household heating coal-to-electricity programme. A third interest of Chris’ is the structure of urban road networks, globally, and their implication for development and climate policy.

IRES Visiting Professor term: December 2017 – December 2018.

 

 

Ada Smith (RES MA) recipient of the Elizabeth Henry Scholarship!

Congratulations to Ada Smith being one of the two recipients for the 2017 Elizabeth Henry Scholarship!

On behalf of the Fraser Basin Council and the Elizabeth Henry Scholarship Committee, we are excited to announce that the Elizabeth Henry Scholarship for Communities and Environmental Health 2017 recipients are Ada Smith and Kim-Ly Thompson. Here is what Ada had to say about the importance of the Elizabeth Henry Scholarship to their work:

“The support of the Elizabeth Henry Scholarship exemplifies, in the Sm’algyax language, “bax laansk” – or how we can come together in collaborative research and in decolonizing approaches toward a just and sustainable food system.” -Ada Smith

https://www.fraserbasin.bc.ca/Elizabeth_Henry_Scholarship_Recipients.html

About the Elizabeth Henry Scholarship for Communities and Environmental Health

The Elizabeth Henry Scholarship provides an annual award of $2,000 for eligible research projects. The Scholarship is funded by the Fraser Basin Council, British Columbia Clean Air Research (BC CLEAR) Fund and by many friends, family members and colleagues who wish to remember Elizabeth and her work. 2016 was the Scholarship’s inaugural year. If you wish to contribute to the Elizabeth Henry Scholarship Fund, you can do so through the Vancouver Foundation website. You can contact the Scholarship Committee at ehscholarshipcommittee@gmail.com