Speakers

RachelWarrenDr. Rachel Warren (University of East Anglia)
Dr. Rachel Warren holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the production of policy-relevant environmental science, related to climate change and sustainability. Dr. Warren leads the team that has developed the Community Integrated Assesment System, CIAS, which links together models of the climate system, climate change impacts and the global economy.

Rachel Warren has been the lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was awarded the Nobel Peace prize on 2007. Her former work at the NOAA Environmental Research Laboratories provided evidence on the environmental acceptability of appropriate replacements for ozone-depleting substances, leading to inclusion of fluorocarbons in the Kyoto Protocol. She has published over 30 peer reviewed papers and chapters in edited books and produced over 25 policy relevant reports.

Barry_Smit_PProf. Barry Smit (University of Guelph, Canada)
Barry Smit is Professor Emeritus in Geography at the University of Guelph. His research and practice on climate change impacts and adaptation span 4 decades. He has authored over 100 scientific papers and 4 books. His work has been influential in international negotiations on climate change, and has been applied in development initiatives in Asia, Africa, the Americas, the Pacific and the Arctic.

Barry Smit has collaborated with major UN organizations and international development agencies, and has advised governments in countries as diverse as Norway, USA, Bangladesh, Britain and Samoa. In Canada he has counseled governments, business groups and community organizations. As a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. For service to Canadian society he was invested into the Order of Ontario, and received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. In 2013 he was awarded the highest honor of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the SSHRC Gold Medal.

AndreaNightingaleProf. Andrea Nightingale (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, SLU)
Professor Andrea Nightingale has a PhD in Geography from the University of Minnesota, where she was a MacArthur Scholar. She holds several national and international commissions of trust and has worked in several research projects, of which many explore state transition and climate change in Nepal. Her on-going collaborations also include working closely on the politics of climate change adaptation at Noragric, NMBU in Norway, where she holds a Professor II position. Her academic interests span political ecology, socio-natures, critical development studies, feminist theory, and methodological work. She has published over 20 peer reviewed journal articles and written 16 book chapters. She works in an interdisciplinary context, always trying to challenge the divide between the social and natural sciences.

Farhana_SultanaProf. Farhana Sultana (Syracuse University)
Professor Farhana Sultana holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Minnesota, where she was a MacArthur Scholar and an International Water Management Institute (IWMI) Fellow. She has been a Programme Officer at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), responsible for managing a multi-million dollar environmental program, a Visiting Fellow at the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester, and a Lecturer in the Geography Department at King’s College London. She has worked with a wide variety of international organizations, government agencies, and NGOs around the world, and her interdisciplinary work engages with academic and non-academic audiences. Since 2008 she has been on the faculty in the Geography Department of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Her recent work has primarily focused on nature-society relationships, political ecology, development studies, feminist theories, climate change, and water governance. Professor Sultana has published over two dozen academic publications, edited several special issues of international journals, published policy briefs and reports, and is co-editor if a book on the right to water, which has been translated into other languages. Her current research projects examine climate adaptation struggles in Bangladesh as well as urban water crises in the Global South.​

Markku_KanninenDr. Markku Kanninen (University of Helsinki)
Dr. Markku Kanninen is the Professor of Tropical Silviculture and the Director of Viikki Natural Resources Institute (VITRI) at the University of Helsinki. He has been involved in tropical forest research for over 30 years and is an expert in tropical forest ecology, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and forest management. He has published more than 300 publications including more than 70 scientific articles in international peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Kanninen has been actively involved in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1990 and received the Nobel Peace Prize as a member of the IPCC in 2007.

Anja_NygrenProf. Anja Nygren (University of Helsinki)
Professor Anja Nygren is an Associate Professor in Development Studies, in the University of Helsinki. She is also Adjunct Professor of Environmental Policy at the University of Helsinki and Adjunct Professor of Political Ecology at the University of Tampere. She is an expert in environmental governance in Southern cities and has coordinated several multidisciplinary research projects in Latin America. Her research interests include political ecology of urban governance, global networks of production and consumption, environmental protection and social justice, people-nature relationships, and global flows and local livelihoods.

Prof. Nygren has worked as a visiting scholar and visiting lecturer in various international universities and is renowned for her teaching methods. She is a Member of the Teachers’ Academy of the University of Helsinki, which is the Network of Dinstinguished Teachers in Higher Education. Her merits as a teacher have also been acknowledged with several nominations and in 2011 she got an Award of Excellent Teacher at the University of Helsinki.