The Climate and Health Interdisciplinary Research Programme (CHIRP) at Leeds is based in the Priestly International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds. CHIRP@LEEDS is a joint collaboration across the climate and global health themes, and partners the Leeds School of Earth and Environment, and the Leeds Institute for Health Sciences, including the Nuffield Centre for Global Health and Development. Led by Professor Lea Berrang-Ford, the programme integrates interdisciplinary expertise across Leeds faculties, including strengths in public health, epidemiology, medicine, engineering, climate science, nutrition, and geography.
McGill Geography MA student Dylan Clark's masters research was in the news this week. Dylan's work, which builds on environmental epidemiology tools to model weather impacts on search and rescue events in the Arctic, was published recently in the journal Public Health. Dylan is supervised by Dr. James Ford, and Dr. Lea Berrang Ford was a committee advisor for his quantitative analysis.
See the CBC article here. See the research article here. Joe Lewnard, who began his environmental epidemiology training in the McGill Geographical and Environmental Epidemiology Lab, contributes to international risk assessment and planning for Zika during the Brazil Olympics this month.
See the CBC article here. See a related article by Joe in The WIRE here. More information on Joe can be found on his website. I was pleased to be selected as one of the speakers for McGill's Mini-Science 2016: Weather and Climate: Going to Extremes. My lecture focused on the widely held recognition that the global climate is changing and that societies will need to adapt.
Using results obtained through the IHACC and TRAC3 projects (1: Ford, Berrang-Ford; 2: Lesnikowsk, Ford, Biesbroek, Berrang-Ford, Heymann), my lecture explored the implications of the dispersion of global funds to support adaptation. With $20-64 billion in fast-tracked funding already being invested, the 2015 Paris Agreement will increase this amount to $100 billion annually by 2020. Canada is among the largest adaptation donors to these funds. This growth in global finance for adaptation underscores the urgency with which to understand how and where adaptation is needed and is feasible, and monitor the use of adaptation funds. Are we adapting, to what, and how? This presentation will explore the challenge of global human adaptation to climate change, and explore efforts and opportunities to systematically track and evaluate progress on adaptation policy and practice. You can watch the entire lecture for free here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BeAnUntHN0&list=PLfMfJihLOASWr1MAN0C-EwGl-AS5yH2cq&index=5 1: "Adaptation tracking for a post-2015 climate agreement." J.D. Ford, L. Berrang-Ford, R. Biesbroek, M. Araos, S.E. Austin and A. Lesnikowski. Nature Climate Change 5:967-69 (23 October 2015). DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2744 2: "National-level progress on adaptation." Alexandra Lesnikowski, James Ford, Robbert Biesbroek, Lea Berrang-Ford & S. Jody Heymann. Nature Climate Change (09 November 2015 ). DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2863 |