Sustainability education in a botanical garden promotes environmental knowledge, attitudes, and intentions to act
Abstract:
Creating behavior change at local levels to mobilize significant and widespread transition toward a sustainable future is one of the biggest challenges of our time. Botanical gardens play an important role in this shift because they provide an environment conducive to education, research, and conservation. Inspired by the UNFAO Farmer Field School, we developed a collaborative and community-based education program to engage adults from local businesses and organizations in topics of sustainability. Our Sustainable Communities Field School, hosted at UBC Botanical Garden, operates as a corporate team-building retreat event. Participants are guided through a 300-meter-long treetop canopy walk, visit a food garden, bee hive and engage in group activities while receiving verbal education about water, food, waste and biodiversity.
A total of 405 participants took part in the 2016-2017 study. We found that after their visit, Field School participants were significantly more knowledgeable about ecological topics, more connected to nature, and more willing to engage in sustainability actions compared to regular garden visitors who did not receive a guided tour. Our results suggest that a sustainability education program delivered at a botanical garden can be an effective model to promote environmental knowledge, attitudes and willingness to act.
Seminar video coming soon!
Ivana Zelenika
Bio:
I am a PhD Candidate working with co-supervision of Dr. Jiaying Zhao and Dr. John Robinson. Completed a Master’s of Environmental Studies at Queen’s University (Kingston), and a B.A. from Carleton University (Ottawa) in Environmental Studies, with a minor in Political Science.
As an active member in campus life I worked as a Zero Waste Coordinator with UBC Campus and Community Planning Sustainability Office for 2 years in a work-learn position. During this time, I collaborated with campus sustainability groups and departments in rolling out the recycling and composting infrastructure, prepared communication materials, and provided support in education and research of zero waste. My research is supported by SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and the UBC Four Year Fellowship.
Resilience has become a key discourse and a policy tool in many urban contexts, including Cape Town. A recent addition to the 100 Resilient Cities Initiative, the City of Cape Town is facing the dual goals of dealing with increasingly more pronounced climate change impacts – such as intensified flooding and more frequent droughts – while also delivering equitable services and redressing historically entrenched spatial and socio-political inequalities. Facing one of its worst droughts in over a century, Cape Town is leveraging ideas of resilience in dealing with the current water shortages and planning for a new approach for water management in the future. To trace how the resilience agenda is unfolding in Cape Town and what the associated implications are for planning in the water sector, this research investigates situated notions of resilience through qualitative research conducted with city officials, managers and planners at the City of Cape Town.
Seminar video not available.
Bio:
Lucy Rodina is a PhD Candidate, supervised by Leila Harris, at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, a Liu Scholar at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, and International WaTERS Graduate Fellow. She is also involved with the Water Ethics Network as an outreach coordinator, helping to develop strategies to promote awareness around water ethics. Lucy co-chairs Sustainable Water Future’s Water Ethics core working group. In her doctoral research, she studies the intersection of water governance, resilience and environmental justice in urban contexts. Her focus is on the nascent challenges to urban water governance in the face of global environmental change and their implications for transformation in the urban water sector. She engages critically with resilience, evaluating the various ways in which resilience thinking is reshaping urban water governance across different scales.
IRES extends our congratulations to Dr. Mark Johnson on being newly appointed as a Canada Research Chair in Ecohydrology. His role as an ecohydrologist will help contribute to research on water and carbon cycle management in relation to environmental sustainability and climate change. Mark Johnson joins IRES faculty members Navin Ramankutty, Stephanie Chang, Hadi Dowlatabadi, and Jiaying Zhao in holding the Canada Research Chair designation.
IRES Postdoctoral Fellow Nathan Bennett recently published an article on Biological Conservation titled “Conservation social science: Understanding and integrating human dimensions to improve conservation” and was recently featured on the University of Washington’s website.
People must be part of the equation in conservation projects. This will increase local support and the effectiveness of conservation.
That’s the main conclusion of a study published online Nov. 29 in the journal Biological Conservation. In it, an international group of scientists recognizes the need to consider humans’ livelihoods, cultural traditions and dependence on natural resources when planning and carrying out conservation projects around the world.
“We really need to think about people as we’re creating conservation initiatives. Forgetting about humans in the conservation recipe is like forgetting yeast in a loaf of bread,” said lead author Nathan Bennett, a researcher at the University of Washington, the University of British Columbia and Stanford University.
As the Earth continues to lose species and natural resources, the common approach to conservation has been to emphasize natural science to solve ecological problems, leaving people’s relationships to natural resources out of the discussion. Increasingly, natural scientists and social scientists are partnering to try to consider both the needs of nature and of stakeholders. But for lack of good precedent, funding and will, often conservation organizations and activities don’t fully consider the human dimensions of conservation, the authors found.
“When people are ignored and conservation measures are put in, we see opposition, conflict and often failure,” Bennett said. “These problems require the best available evidence, and that includes having both natural and social scientists at the table.”
This paper follows dozens of studies that point out the need for humans to be considered in environmental management and conservation, but few have articulated the benefits of doing so and exactly how to do this, Bennett explained. This review paper is the first to bring together the entire storyline by listing the practical contributions the variety of social sciences can offer to improve conservation.
“This paper helps us to move beyond statements about the need for this toward actually setting the agenda,” Bennett said.
Two years ago, Bennett convened an international working group to find ways to practically involve more social scientists from fields such as geography, history, anthropology and economics in conservation projects. This paper is one of several outcomes from that working group. Another paper published in July 2016 suggests that conservation organizations and funders should put more emphasis on social sciences and explains what an ideal “conservation team” could look like.
“Modern environmental problems require diverse and creative teams to find solutions,” Bennett explained.
This new study calls for action to ensure that we have learned the lessons from past failures and successes of ignoring or considering human dimensions in conservation.
In Thailand, for example, officials set up a series of marine protected areas along the country’s coastline to try to conserve threatened habitats, including coral reefs, mangroves and seagrass meadows. But they didn’t consider the thousands of fishermen and women who live near or inside the marine protected areas and rely on fishing and harvesting for livelihoods and feeding their families. Fishing bans and unfair treatment have led to resentment and opposition. In one case, fishermen burned a ranger station in protest.
To add to the divisiveness, big commercial boats still caught fish in these areas because the protection zones were not well enforced.
A recent successful example was the creation of California’s marine protected area network. Local fisheries and communities, along with scientists, fishery managers, government and industry, were all brought to the table and the outcome ultimately was supported by most groups involved, Bennett explained.
Successful conservation projects happen when both natural and social scientists are working with government, nonprofits, resource managers and local communities to come up with solutions that benefit everyone. This can take more time and resources at the outset, but Bennett and his collaborators argue that social scientists are often in a position to help make this a more efficient process.
“Ignoring the people who live in an area can be a costly mistake for conservation. This is one of those cases where an ounce of prevention can be worth more than a pound of cure,” he said. “Specialists in the social sciences can develop more creative, robust and effective solutions to environmental problems that people are going to get behind.”
Patrick Christie, a UW professor in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, is a co-author on the paper. Other co-authors are from the University of British Columbia, Stanford University, the University of Guelph, the University of Saskatchewan, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the University of Victoria, the University of Wyoming, the University of Waterloo, the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Switzerland, Oregon State University, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Cornell University, Slippery Rock University, Georgia State University and World Wildlife Fund International.
This study and co-authors were funded by the Canadian Wildlife Federation, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the Liber Ero Foundation, Fulbright Canada, the Smith Fellowship Program, the National Science Foundation and a number of other organizations. See the paper for a complete list.
Chicken little and the coal mine in the sky: is the IPCC vision of catastrophic climate change still plausible?
Abstract:
We are awful at managing our resources. It would be good if we knew how to do better, but history is replete with dire future predictions which were well-intentioned and entirely wrong. How can we be wiser in avoiding long-term disasters while not falling prey to histrionics borne of error?
All century scale models of global change assume continued prosperity of humans. They are then tweaked to narrowly focus on a particular concern. This leads to myopic analysis of how we could influence whatever may pass. The longer a field shapes its long-term vision with this style of approach, the more likely it is to accumulate systematic blind spots. Malthus pioneered a narrative of doom around prosperity, population growth and agricultural production. Has the IPCC made much progress since the 18th-century?
In this talk we focus on a case study of catastrophic climate change outlooks, and the systematic errors embodied in that narrative. We will explain how these errors have crept in to the broader public, political and scientific discourse. We invite a lively and critical discussion of how to engage the public with questions of deep uncertainty about the long term.
Bios:
Hadi Dowlatabadi’s research is focused at the interface of nature, humans, technology and policy. He uses a systems approach to capture the dynamics of such systems, applying a value of information approach to focus on research that matters most.
Justin Ritchie is a PhD Candidate at IRES. His work in energy economics focuses on cultivating wise prospects for investment in regional and global energy system development by drawing on integrated studies of physical and social science.
Tropical forests are an undervalued asset in meeting the greatest global challenges of our time—averting climate change and promoting sustainable development. Despite their importance, tropical forests are being destroyed at a high and even increasing rate in most forest-rich countries. The good news is that the science, economics, and politics are aligned to support a major international effort to reverse tropical deforestation.
Why Forests? Why Now? is a new book by Frances Seymour and Jonah Busch that synthesizes the latest research on the importance of tropical forests in a way that is accessible to anyone interested in climate change and development and to readers already familiar with the problem of deforestation. It makes the case to decision-makers in rich countries that rewarding developing countries for protecting their forests is urgent, affordable, and achievable.
This seminar will not be filmed.
Biography
Dr. Jonah Busch is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development. He is an environmental economist whose research focuses on climate change and tropical deforestation. His research on climate and forests has been published in academic journals including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics, and Environmental Research Letters. He serves on the editorial board of Conservation Letters. He is a research fellow at the Center for Effective Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting scholar at the College of Environmental and Resource Sciences of Zhejiang University.
Location: AERL Theatre (room 120), 2202 Main Mall, UBC
The IRES Student Symposium is an annual event that happens every April. It showcases the research done by our Resources, Environment and Sustainability (RES) graduate students.
Speaker Schedule:
1:15pm to 1:45pm – Emma Luker (MSc), Supervisors: Leila Harris and Mark Johnson
1:45pm to 2:15pm – Santiago de la Puente Jeri (MSc), Supervisor: Villy Christensen
2:15pm to 2:45pm – Tugce Conger (PhD), Supervisor: Stephanie Chang
Coffee break 2:45pm to 3pm
3pm to 3:30pm – Xuesi Shen (MSc), Supervisor: Hadi Dowlatabadi
3:30pm to 4pm – Myriam Khalfallah (PhD), Supervisor: Daniel Pauly
4pm to 4:30pm – Maggie Low (PhD), Supervisor: Terre Satterfield
Speaker Bios:
Emma Luker, MSc Student
Bio: Emma is a Master of Science (MSc) student in Resource Management and Environmental Studies working with Drs. Leila Harris and Mark Johnson. Emma graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and Science (BA&Sc Hons.) in Environmental Studies from McGill University in 2014. Between her undergraduate and graduate degrees Emma worked in several different professional settings, such as a peace and conflict NGO in Colorado, U.S.A, and a renewable energy consulting company in Yokohama, Japan. She has been awarded an NSERC grant and an International WaTERS Fellowship for her graduate research, which focuses on groundwater governance in Cape Town, South Africa. Emma is currently a member of the EDGES research collaborative, the Program on Water Governance and the UBC Ecohydro Lab.
Talk title: Groundwater governance in the face of drought: the case of Cape Town, South Africa
Abstract: Water managers in Cape Town indicate that the record low rainfall of 2015 has caused the worst drought they have seen in 30 years. This recent drought is expediting the need for additional water management mechanisms, one of which is water supply diversification. However, given the historical focus on surface water infrastructure, there are significant obstacles in integrating new sources, like groundwater, into the supply chain. This talk will be aimed at presenting an analysis of the barriers and opportunities for groundwater governance in Cape Town from a long-term planning perspective. Insights will analyze the groundwater perceptions of water managers, in relation to the decisions being made about two new aquifer schemes, which are projected to soon be part of Cape Town’s water future.
Santiago de la Puente Jeri, MSc Student
Bio: I am a Peruvian researcher that has been studying the ecological and human dimensions of the Humboldt Current in Peru, with emphasis on its fisheries. My research interests include: (1) seafood value chains, (2) ecological modelling, (3) fisheries governance, (4) ecosystem-based fisheries management, and (5) economic valuation of ecosystem services. Before joining the RMES program, I worked as an Associate Researcher at the Centre for Environmental Sustainability of the Cayetano Heredia University (2010-2015), I was Advisor to the Vice-Minister of Fisheries in Peru (2012), and I worked as a Consultant for OCEANA, GEF-UNDP, FAO, among others (2012-2016).
Talk title: Reconstructing shark catch and consumption patterns in Peru
Abstract: Sharks are among the most endangered groups of marine organisms due to their life history characteristics and current levels of fishing. Quantifying domestic consumption of shark products has been identified as a serious data gap worldwide. In Peru, one of the major global suppliers of shark fins, sharks have received little attention from research, monitoring and regulatory bodies. Thus, catch and consumption patterns are poorly understood, though suspected to be high. This project seeks to reconstruct the Peruvian shark catch by species, following their landings along the seafood value chain to estimate local shark consumption patterns for the 2000-2015 period.
Tugce Conger, PhD Candidate
Bio: Tugce is a PhD Candidate, working with Prof. Stephanie Chang. She got her undergraduate degree in urban and regional planning in Turkey and did her masters degree at the University of Colorado Denver. Before starting her PhD studies at UBC, she worked as a researcher at Colorado Center for Community Development, in Denver Colorado and as an associate urban planner at Baseline Engineering in Golden, Colorado. Tugce’s PhD research focuses mainly on the use of natural assets to reduce coastal flooding risks, sea level rise adaptation, vulnerability assessments, resilience building, and stakeholder engagement.
Talk Title: Creating typologies to investigate green infrastructure coastal protection benefits and vulnerability in the Salish Sea
Abstract: Situated at the interface between land and ocean, green infrastructure, natural assets at coasts, are increasingly favorable alternatives to traditional hard coastal protection structures. Green infrastructure provides important coastal protection benefits through reducing wave energy, attenuating floodwater, increasing elevation, reducing erosion and mitigating debris movement. However, influenced by post-industrial climate change and other human activities along the coasts, green infrastructure’s coastal protection role is highly threatened due to its vulnerability to changing environmental conditions. In this talk I will introduce an indicator-based methodology to identify green infrastructure typologies that could help find highest coastal protection benefits in the Salish Sea, while accounting for vulnerability.
Myriam Khalfallah, PhD Student
Bio: Myriam was born and grew up in Tunisia. In 2013, she graduated as an environmental and fisheries engineer from the National Agronomic Institute of Tunisia (INAT). Shortly after, Myriam joined the Sea Around Us to reconstruct fisheries catches for several Mediterranean and Arab countries. She is currently completing her PhD thesis under the supervision of professor Daniel Pauly.
Talk title:Fisheries in Southern Mediterranean and Arab Countries
Abstract: In spite of the societal and economic importance of marine fisheries in Southern Mediterranean and Arab Countries (SMACs), there is a considerable gap of knowledge concerning their state. Following what is collectively known as the “Arab Spring”, the SMACs have been subject to political, societal and economic turmoil. This did not spare fisheries. In the SMACs, fisheries catch databases often represent the only available and affordable information on fisheries. However, such data are incomplete, excluding non-commercial fisheries and discards. By applying the catch reconstruction approach, historical catches by reported, unreported, and illegal, commercial and non-commercial, large- and small- scale marine fisheries, for the time period 1950-2014, have been re-estimated for the SMACs. Main findings suggest an increase of unreported and illegal fishing activities and a high unreliability of official fisheries statistics. In the case of Libya, the fishing sector was directly affected by the social crisis that started in 2011, and largely transitioned into a smuggling industry.
Maggie Low, PhD Candidate
Bio: Maggie Low is a PhD Candidate at the Institute for Resource, Environment and Sustainability and a UBC Public Scholar. Maggie has a keen interest in Indigenous – state relations and environmental change in Western Canada. Her work focuses on the intersection of Indigenous governance and natural resource management in Canada, and specifically how First Nations governance is evolving in coastal British Columbia given recent court cases, the failures of the BC Treaty Process and this new “era of reconciliation.” Maggie completed a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Sciences at the University of Guelph and a Master of Arts in Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria. She currently lives in Vancouver, BC.
Talk Title: Indigenous Governance and the Reconciliation Protocol Agreement: Implications for Heiltsuk Nation
Abstract: In BC, the increasing recognition of Indigenous rights and title is forcing normally powerful stakeholders – resource users, environmental organizations, and all levels of government – to address the concerns of First Nations directly through political negotiating processes currently unfolding and through the implementation of new resource management regimes. Recently, these negotiations have produced Protocol agreements between First Nations governments and the BC government regarding decision-making authority and enhanced economic opportunities for several coastal First Nations. In this talk, Maggie will present some of her findings from investigating the governance implications of on such agreement known as the Reconciliation Protocol Agreement (RPA), signed between Heiltsuk Nation and the BC government in 2010.
Bio: Xuesi Shen is a master student at Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability, studying under the guidance of Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi. Her research interests include resources management, energy and environmental policy, and sustainable development in developing countries. Her current research focuses on how to improve coastal communities’ resilience to potential marine transportation disruption. Before joining IRES, Xuesi earned a BEng in Engineering Physics and a BA in Economics from Tsinghua University in China.
Talk Title: Resilience of the Coastal Communities in British Columbia: Fuel Management
Abstract: Coastal and island communities in British Columbia are highly dependent on maritime transportation system to support their basic needs. Traditionally, these communities have kept substantial local caches of their primary needs. However, with the drive towards more efficient logistics and Just-In-Time delivery, local caches have been eliminated with frequent maritime service. This trend leads to the shortage of critical supplies when there is a disruption in regular maritime service. Among all the critical supplies, fuel plays a key role in disaster relief. Services such as fire, police and medical are directly dependent on fuel availability. Our study focuses on how to manage the vulnerability of coastal communities to fuel shortages in the event of marine transport disruptions.
Photo credit: Andy Morffew from flickr/Creative Commons
REAL-TIME,ADAPTIVE,SELF-LEARNINGMANAGEMENTOFLAKES IN A CHANGING CLIMATE
Abstract
Lakes and reservoirs are increasingly threatened by anthropogenic activities, with serious environmental and financial consequences. Of particular concern are increases in thermal stratification due to global warming, and increases in nutrient loading due to increased waste disposal. In deep lakes increasing seasonal water column stability can suppress periodic overturns, fostering the deoxygenation of hypolimnetic waters. When overturn does occur, the large volume of deoxygenated hypolimnetic water threatens fauna and flora. Reservoirs and shallow lakes are increasingly experiencing toxic algal blooms in response to diurnal stratification patterns changing in combination with increasing nutrient loadings.
Two prominent examples are used to illustrate problems presently encountered, and the range of control strategies available to manage the consequences. It will then be shown how adaptive, real-time, self learning technologies may be used to dynamically optimize ecosystem health, as both the impacts and the system change with time.
Lake Iseo, Italy: The period between overturns, in Lake Iseo, has increased from around every ten years to twenty years over the last 50 years, We show that the water column stratification maybe controlled with solar powered impellers allowing the frequency of overturning to be regulated so as to prevent the build up of large volumes of hypolimnetic low oxygen
Lake Ypacarai, Paraguay is a shallow lake that is experiencing severe eutrophication resulting in severe toxic algal blooms that are having a devastating impact on the economy of Using numerical simulations of the lake ecosystem, we carried out a sensitivity analysis of the available controls for the mitigation of the algal blooms: decrease nutrient loadings, decreasing water levels, flushing the lake with bore water, and increasing the water opacity.
The results for both lakes facilitate the installation of a real-time adaptive management system that uses model forecasts of the lake ecosystem to optimize the controls.
JörgImberger:
Professor Imberger is an Adjunct Professor at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, Florida and visiting Professor at the Venice University, Italy. His research foci are the motion and mixing in lakes, estuaries and coastal seas in response to both natural and anthropogenic forcing and understanding the consequences when human tribal behavior is connected to the internet.
For several decades Professor Imberger has been a world-leader in Environmental Fluid Mechanics. He has received many
awards including Onassis International Prize (1995), the The Stockholm Water Prize (1996) and the Redfield Life Time Achievement Award
(2007). In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia and in 2008 he was named Scientist of the Year of Western Australia.
Professor Imberger has directed and participated in field research projects in Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Laos, Korea, Japan, China, Israel, Jordan, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Greece, Macedonia, Canada, US, Mexico, Columbia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Kenya and South Africa.
Professor Imberger has published 5 books, with two in preparation, contributed to 19 books and has published 261 Journals papers and numerous reports. Google Scholar credits him with 17,653 citations and an h-Index of 61.
The west coast of North America supports over 9 species of pacific salmon and trout that exhibit an astonishingly wide array of life-history strategies. In the first part of this talk I will consider differentiation of phenotype and life-history among salmonid species, populations, and individuals at the freshwater juvenile rearing stage, and how adaptive differentiation relates to habitat partitioning and associated tradeoffs in phenotype, particularly selection on juvenile growth. Variation among rainbow trout individuals and populations supports the interpretation of a general adaptive tradeoff between selection for high growth vs. active metabolic performance. Life-history and growth differentiation among west coast salmonids can also be interpreted through the lens of evolutionary pressure to escape habitat bottlenecks that limit adult population size.
Stream flow represents a major environmental determinant of juvenile salmonid abundance and a significant regulatory challenge, as domestic and industrial water demands increasingly conflict with flow needs for fish. Despite the need for clear science advice on minimum flows required to support fish production, instream flow science has seen limited evolution over the last 40 years. I will review the potential for bioenergetic modelling of juvenile salmonid growth to be used as a tool to better predict the biological consequences of low stream flows, which are a natural consequence of seasonal summer drought in coastal British Columbia. Low summer flows represent a habitat bottleneck to salmonid production in many coastal streams; this natural bottleneck will be exacerbated by increasing water demands in conjunction with warming temperatures under climate change, reduced snow pack, and eutrophication from urban and agricultural development. Managing for persistence of salmonid-bearing streams in productive landscapes like the lower Fraser Valley requires long-term landscape modelling to anticipate the synergistic consequences of land use and climate change, and to identify the current management actions required to ensure future persistence.
Finally, freshwater and marine ecosystems display strong contrasts in the magnitude and trophic basis of biological production, the drivers of which remain poorly understood. I will consider how contrasting kinetic energy subsidies (physical energy that generates biological production) contribute to differences in the magnitude of benthic production between streams, lakes, and the marine intertidal.
Bio: Jordan Rosenfeld is a Stream Ecology Scientist with the British Columbia Ministry of the Environment based out of UBC. He did his M.Sc. degree at the University of Guelph studying primary production and energy flow in forested streams, and a Ph.D. at UBC studying fish predation effects on benthic invertebrate community structure in coastal streams. He currently does a variety of work related to management of freshwater habitats, including the effects of stream habitat structure on productive capacity for juvenile salmonids, stream restoration, modelling drift-foraging bioenergetics of salmonids, assessing critical habitat of freshwater fish species and risk, and instream flow modelling.
