MSU Hosts International Symposium on Climate Change

Contact: Jessica A. Knoblauch, News Writer for Environmental Science and Policy Program: (517) 432-3823 or knoblau7@msu.edu

November 20, 2006

This March, Michigan State University’s Environmental Science and Policy Program (ESPP) will host an international symposium on climate change. The conference, titled Climate Change in the Great Lakes Region: Decision Making Under Uncertainty, will be held in the Kellogg Conference Center on March 15 and 16, 2007, and is free to the public. ESPP welcomes researchers, policy makers, and other Great Lakes region stakeholders to attend. 

The conference is part two of the university’s initiative to explore and discuss the potential affects of climate change in the Great Lakes region. Part one, held last December, was a workshop that introduced the potential effects of climate change in the Great Lakes region. There, attendees discussed the impacts of climate change and the kinds of information that would be helpful in addressing those impacts.

The March symposium will feature diverse speakers. “Our goal is to draw the top minds together on the climate change issue,” says David Bidwell, a doctoral student in the Sociology Department who is helping to coordinate the conference.

Academics who will be holding talks during the day on Thursday and Friday morning include:

• Terry Root and Steve Schneider are both Senior Fellows at the Center for Environmental Science and Policy at Stanford University’s Institute for International Studies and co-editors of Wildlife Responses to Climate Change: North American Case Studies. Root is lead author of an article published in Nature titled “Fingerprints of Global Warming on Wild Animals and Plants.” Schneider is the founder and editor of the journal Climatic Change.
• Barry Smit is the Canada Research Chair in Global Environmental Change at the University of Guelph and Director of the Canadian Climate Impacts and Adaptation Research Network. Smit studies the impacts of climate change on resource-use sectors, particularly agriculture.
• Elke Webber is Jerome A. Chazen Professor of International Business and co-director of the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia University. Webber also serves on the advisory committee on Human Dimensions in Global Change for the National Academy of Sciences.

Additionally, the symposium will feature three groups of discussants from non-profit organizations, government agencies and industry. “These are the kinds of people that are actually going to have to be making changes to help deal with climate change,” says Bidwell. “The hope is that these groups will provide a certain amount of grounding to the academic work that we hear.”

The symposium will also address the issue of decision making under uncertainty. Though there is a scientific consensus that climate change is already happening, there is much disagreement about what its magnitude will be. “There are these layers of uncertainty when looking at the affects of climate change. This creates a problem when looking at how to adapt to the changes,” says Bidwell. “However, Michigan State is well suited to be talking about these adaptation issues.”

The conference will conclude Friday afternoon with discussions that will focus on what these issues could mean for a research agenda at Michigan State.  “You have to know what the key questions are before you can begin looking for the answers,” says Bidwell. “Once you have a clear vision of what research is needed, it helps in forming interdisciplinary teams to look for projects based on an informed level.”

Those interested in attending this free event can register at http://environment.msu.edu/climatechange/index.html.