Adaptation to climate change seminar series

Avoid the Unmanageable, Manage the Unavoidable: What can we expect from the climate in the coming decades, and what might we do?

Speaker: Professor Charlie F Kennel

Venue: the Plumb Auditorium, Christ's College Cambridge

Time: 5:30pm - 7:00pm followed by drinks

This term, CSaP's inaugural Visiting Research Fellow Professor Charlie F Kennel will deliver a series of seminars on adaptation to climate change, hosted by Christ's College Cambridge.

Professor Kennel is Vice-Chancellor and Director emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Christ’s College. He will be spending the next three months as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy.

These seminars are designed for a general audience.

For more information, please click on the relevant links below.

Thursday 16 January: Introduction

In his first seminar of the series, Professor Kennel will give a brief history of the development of climate research; discuss the relationship between atmospheric abundance of CO² and global temperature over time, and the fundamental truths about the long-term future.

To read more, please click here.

Thursday 23 January: Impacts of Climate Change

Can we infer from today’s changes and climate models what tomorrow’s world might look like? This talk will cover areas such as regional weather patterns, water availability, floods, drought, wildfires; impacts on agriculture, ecology, human disease and regional technical systems.

To read more, please click here.

Thursday 30 January: Why and how we will have to adapt?

In this talk, Professor Kennel will discuss the reasons why we may not be able to avoid 2C warming by 2050, and adaptive management strategy.

To read more, please click here.

Thursday 13 February: Sea Level Rise, Coastal Cities, and Wetlands

This seminar will look at factors affecting rates of global and local sea level rise; how advanced regions are preparing - Venice, the Netherlands, and Sacramento Bay-Delta; vulnerable cities, agricultural river deltas, low-lying island nations.

To read more, please click here.

Thursday 20 February: California and the Arctic

In this seminar, Professor Kennel will discuss the first and most advanced regional assessments; impacts on regional natural systems, regional technical systems, and populations; and assessments - the first step in adaptive management.

To read more, please click here.

Thursday 27 February: Adaptive Management of Climate Change

This seminar will cover the essential role of assessment in the adaptive management of complex systems; the regional specificity of climate change impacts; the critical role of local communities; the complexity of knowledge assembly for regional and local decision‐support; and the need to encourage timely decisions; “Knowledge Action Networks” comprising international experts and local decision‐makers can foster informed and timely decisions at the regional and local levels.

To read more, please click here.