Places of Climate Change 2025 Seminars
Dr Sarah Stein Lubrano
In this short talk, social theorist Sarah Stein Lubrano will present some key ideas from her book, Don't Talk About Politics, which argues that a focus on debate and a "marketplace of ideas" serve as distractions (and worse) from the real work of political change: building key relationships and helping people take action in the world.
Dr. Stein Lubrano will then explore a key concept in the book, cognitive dissonance, and argue that it can help to understand the reasons people sometimes accept, and sometimes reject, new pieces of legislation. Using the example of low-emission zones, which have received extreme blowback from the public in recent years, she will ask: what would it take to help the public accept climate legislation? Can, and should, politicians and policy-makers do what it takes? And can the same psychology be used for ill?
Professor Rhiannon Tudor Edwards
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This seminar is an opportunity to learn about the challenges health economists are facing in beginning to think about incorporating sustainability issues into a traditional model of health technology assessment. In addition, Rhiannon will outline how, as health economists at , ÐãÉ«Ö±²¥, we are supporting Public Health Wales and contributing to the international debate about measuring the health co-benefits of actions across health systems to mitigate climate change.
This seminar may be of interest to health economists, public health practitioners interested in population health, and scientists interested in One Health and climate change. We would also like to welcome interested individuals from health boards and local authorities as this is a transdisciplinary, intersectoral system level topic.
Professor Rhiannon Tudor Edwards is founding co-director of the (CHEME), School of Health Sciences at ÐãÉ«Ö±²¥. She focuses on public health and prevention economics research with a team of early-career researchers. Her interest in prevention, following the publication of two published by Oxford University Press, has led her onto a clear path of the need to face the population health and health economics challenges of climate change at a local and international level.
Dr Charlie Gardner
University of Kent.
The conservation of nature has always been a place-based effort to prevent and reverse change – we seek to conserve the biodiversity we have, and ideally restore it to a desired past state. However, planetary heating means change is inevitable and renders this approach obsolete, so conservationists must reconsider what we‘re trying to achieve as the planet heats. Using the future of Britain’s forests as a thought experiment, I suggest that conservationists should seek to maintain functional ecosystems rather than trying to prevent the local extinction of species, and that this will require a change to our non-interventionist approaches. It will mean looking to the future rather than the past, identifying the species that will thrive in future conditions, and facilitating their establishment through assisted colonisation.
This provocative talk brings nature, climate change and geography together to explore how we adapt to our changing world, and will interest anyone with an interest in place or the future.
Dr Charlie Gardner is a conservationist, climate communicator and activist. An associate senior lecturer at Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE, University of Kent), his work focuses on the role of academic activism in the climate movement and adapting the conservation sector to the emerging realities of the climate crisis.
Dr Gary Robinson
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This interdisciplinary paper will explore the relationship between traditional ways of environmental understanding, within Welsh coastal and maritime communities, and contemporary perceptions of coastal erosion driven by rising sea-levels and greater storminess at sea. The focus of study will be the coastline of Gwynedd in North Wales. The paper will take a broad chronological view of the topic in order to explore the long-term evidence for changes along the coast and communities’ response to these. Within this region physical evidence for coastal change is present within the: Celtic myths of the Cantre'r Gwaelod; submerged forests of Cardigan Bay; erosion of prehistoric and historic landmarks such as Dinas Dinlle; the loss of farmland due to sand inundation and in the proposed total evacuation of the township of Fairbourne. Using methodologies drawn from archaeology, landscape history and physical geography we will explore past, present, and future human responses to life within this dynamic coastal landscape. We will conclude that through human engagement with the maritime and coastal landscape, communities make sense of change by creating historically situated narratives, and that such narratives offer an alternative, and timeless, alternative to the dehumanising logic of science.
Richard A Shirres, MSc (App.Env.Sc.), MICE,
UN Assoc.-Menai Secretary
The talk outlines the pragmatic origins of the United Nations. Arising from the post-WWII developing awareness of the need for environmental protection, the UN became the world’s international organisation that went on to develop and systematically lead on the international environmental agenda. Its inherent advocacy for multilateral agreements, especially informed by purposely created scientific bodies, has led it to achieve international consensus around key conventions governing Biodiversity, Climate and Desertification; all now crucial to our enfolding climate and ecological emergency as humanity, through its own paradigm construct, continues to threaten planetary boundaries.
RECOMMENDED FOR ALL RESEARCHERS
For anyone interested in the principles of today’s global ecological management, this talk gives insight into the historical strides the UN made towards international environmental protection, so, afford a greater appreciation of the foundational legacy of this international multilateralism underpinning those principles.
(Indirectly, it affirms the premise that the challenges we now face are born out of an irrational paradigm constructed from political dogma, injustice and corporate interests)
Read the session handout 'We do have a climate & economical emergency... and we need to talk'.