Checking the forecast on your phone has gotten a lot less predictable. Between catastrophic weather events and seasons behaving erratically, it’s undeniable that climate change is no longer a future problem: it’s here now. Thankfully, there are tools to help mitigate some of the impacts. Better climate information gives us the opportunity to identify our vulnerabilities and mathematics can be applied to a range of adaptation strategies – from city planning to actuarial calculations, climate services and more.

In this edition of What the Number Say, we shine a light on how climate scientists use modelling approaches to inform human decisions and help us take appropriate action. This is your chance to ask the experts about everything from heat impact, flood risk and human decisions and adaptation planning.

Moderator:

Vanessa Schweizer

Vanessa Schweizer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Knowledge Integration in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo. She is Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI), a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change (IC3) and Fellow at the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University. Her research has focused on decision-making under uncertainty, namely the problem of near-term decision-making in the context of long-term consequences. She has considered this problem with respect to climate change and long-term energy planning. In these fields, scenarios are often used to make sense of complex and ‘slow-moving’ problems.

Panel:

Chris Bauch

Chris Bauch is a full professor and a university research chair in the Department of Applied Mathematics and core member of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI). His research group develops mathematical and computational models of the dynamics of natural systems, such as ecosystems or infectious diseases. The particular emphasis is on understanding how human systems and natural systems interact with one another, and how this understanding can be used to improve ecosystem health and human health. His study systems include forest-grassland ecosystem mosaics, forest pest infestations, childhood vaccine scares, and influenza vaccination, among. His research partners have included the World Health Organization, the United States Food and Drug Administration, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Madhur Anand

Madhur Anand is a Full Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of Guelph. She is an award-winning ecologist with research interests ranging from theoretical to empirical studies of global ecological changes in ecosystems at regional and global scales and their implications for human-environment sustainability. She has collaborated with mathematicians, theoretical physicists, statisticians, computer scientists, geographers and poets. She served as Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation from 2015-2018 and in 2019 was appointed the inaugural director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research, where she leads a number of interdisciplinary initiatives to help address our climate emergency and biodiversity crisis. She also serves on many granting panels in both the arts and the sciences, and on the board of directors of the rare Charitable Reserve. Dr. Anand is an award-winning author and poet at Penguin Random House Canada.

Marek Stastna

Marek Stastna is a Full Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo. He is presently serving as Associate Dean, Computing (second term). His research interests span the computational modeling of the climate system. He has academic experience in modeling coastal oceans and lakes, groundwater as well as in conceptual models of the climate. He has a broad experience in how computing has evolved, and in high performance computing both as a user and a manager. Dr. Stastna has served as President of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.