Abstract

This term, Professor Charlie F Kennel is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP) and he will deliver a series of seminars on adaptation to climate change, hosted by Christ’s College. This 6 week series is designed for a general audience and will take place on Thursdays between 5.30pm and 7pm. Each week, there will be a lecture followed by questions and a drinks reception.

In the final seminar of the series, Professor Kennel will discuss the essential role of assessment in the adaptive management of complex systems; the regional specificity of climate change impacts; the critical role of local communities; the complexity of knowledge assembly for regional and local decision‐support; and the need to encourage timely decisions. “Knowledge Action Networks” comprising international experts and local decision‐makers can foster informed and timely decisions at the regional and local levels.

Places are limited so you can register your attendance at this seminar and find out more about the rest of the series by following this link:

CSaP adaptation to climate change seminar series

Biography: Professor Kennel is the former Executive Vice Chancellor of UCLA , its chief academic officer. In the 1990s he was Associate Administrator at NASA and Director of Mission to Planet Earth, the world’s largest Earth science program. Kennel’s experiences at NASA convinced him of the growing importance of Earth and environmental science, and he decided to devote the rest of his career to these and related fields. He became the ninth Director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Vice Chancellor of Marine Sciences at the University of California, San Diego, serving from 1998 to 2006, and was the founding director of the UCSD Environment and Sustainability Initiative. He was the 2007 C.P. Snow lecturer at Christ’s College and is now a Distinguished Visiting Fellow there. He chairs the board of the California Council on Science and Technology and the Space Studies Board of the US National Academy of Sciences. His present interests include global climate change, environmental and marine biological science, coastal science and monitoring, ocean science and policy, management of interdisciplinary science.