CGA Virtual Forum 2022: The Uneven Geography of Climate Change

Date: 

Friday, May 20, 2022, 10:30am to 12:30pm

Location: 

Online via Zoom

uneven_geography_image.jpgWhile a changing climate impacts everyone’s ability to feed and support themselves, these impacts are not experienced equally. The uneven geography of climate change is revealed as grassroots movements and industrialized nations around the world take action. Farmers in India demonstrated in late 2021 that radical and inclusive democratic mobilization can be a force for foundational change in agricultural policies. Their protests and legislative victories came as COP26 concluded with a new resolve to address greenhouse gas emissions, driven by the now obvious and urgent impacts of a warming climate on the globe’s most vulnerable populations and places. Whether borne of these movements or top-down directives, actions to address climate change must react to and target the unevenness of its effects. What is the geography of climate change? How is this unevenness shaping and distorting attitudes and responses? How might the tools of geography lead to a better understanding? 

In this virtual forum, invited speakers and registered attendees will explore the uneven geography of climate change while surveying data and technology that can advance our understanding of these various inequities. We look to examine geographic perspectives on policies, conflicts, disasters, population movements, predictions, models, and other spatially modulated climate effects. We plan to highlight tools that provide insights on geographic changes in climate parameters as well as changes in attitudes and perceptions. We will consider opportunities provided by high performance computing and the use of big data. Discussions will target methods to measure impacts at the human scale, and analytical approaches attuned to questions of climate equity within and between nations, whether social or economic, across racial and ethnic divides, or along dimensions of personal, family, and community health.

Forum Agenda:

Begin

End

Duration

Topic

Speaker

Organization

10:30 AM

10:35 AM

0:05

Welcome & Introduction

S V Subramanian

Harvard CGA & HSPH

10:35 AM

10:50 AM

0:15

Spatial Inequalities in Climate-Sensitive Hazard Impacts

Susan Cutter

University of South Carolina

10:50 AM

11:05 AM

0:15

The Extreme - Weather Climate Gap: Implications at the intersection of risk and vulnerability

Marshall Shepherd

University of Georgia

11:05 AM

11:20 AM

0:15

What is known about the geography of solar geoengineering’s risks and benefits

David Keith

Harvard HKS & SEAS

11:20 AM

11:35 AM

0:15

Climate Change and Global Sentiment

Siqi Zheng

MIT

11:35 AM

11:40 AM

0:05

Unlocking Geospatial Big Data for Climate Change Research using High-Performance Computing

Devika Kakkar

Harvard CGA

11:40 AM

11:45 AM

0:05

Climate Mapping for Cultural Heritage

Pam Hatchfield

Held in Trust

11:45 AM

11:50 AM

0:05

International Public Opinion on Climate Change

Kelsey Mulcahy

Meta

11:50 AM

11:55 AM

0:05

Tracking human responses to climate impacts with NASA’s Black Marble

Eleanor (Kellie) Stokes

Earth from Space Institute

11:55 AM

12:25 PM

0:30

Panel Discussion

Matt Wilson & Doug Richardson (Moderators)

UKY & Harvard CGA

12:25 PM

12:30 PM

0:05

Closing remarks

Doug Richardson

Harvard CGA

Event program (with speakers' bio and abstracts)

This event is free and open to the public. To attend, please register here. 

Recording of this event is available upon request, via https://gis.harvard.edu/contactus.

See also: Conference