This webinar was hosted virtually on Tuesday October 4, 2022. You can now watch the full presentation for free here!
The interconnected crises of energy, security and climate change require rethinking many aspects of modernity. The great power rivalries, accelerating climate related calamities and technological innovations reprise many of the themes first clearly articulated at the 1972 Stockholm United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. Half a century later the urgency of grappling with our predicament, of only having one earth, requires redoubled efforts to link across disciplines, and in particular across the divide between natural and social sciences. Innovative formulations such as the Anthropocene are obviously needed because perpetuating the modern social order based on firepower can no longer provide security. Instead strategies to facilitate adaptation and remove institutional blockages to rapid energy innovation are a key theme for policy makers, and likewise for researchers in numerous geosciences.
Simon Dalby is a Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Senior Research Fellow with the Borders in Globalization program at the University of Victoria’s Centre for Global Studies. He was educated at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Victoria and holds a Ph.D. from SimonFraser University. Prior to joining Wilfrid Laurier University he was Professor of Geography, Environmental Studies and Political Economy at Carleton University. He has served as co-editor of Geography Compass and Geopolitics journals, as the sustainability theme lead for the Borders in Globalization research program, and from 2012 to 2018 he was CIGI Chair in the Political Economy of Climate Change at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. He is coeditor of Reframing Climate Change (Routledge 2016) and Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (Routledge 2019) and author of Anthropocene Geopolitics (University of Ottawa Press 2020), and Rethinking Environmental Security (Edward Elgar 2022). He has active research interests in the contemporary climate security discussion and the burgeoning debate about the Anthropocene and the implications of both for geopolitics and policy formulation.
