SAFES Spring 2022 Distinguished Speaker Series

Answering the call for a new climate science

I am an academic. I am an ecologist. I am a sustainability scientist. I’m a practical person striving to respond to the call for new ways of surviving—or even thriving—in a climate and biodiversity crisis. I heed this call as a researcher and a teacher and as the steward of an interdisciplinary academic community at a major research university. But confronting crisis asks new and different things of academia than we are used to providing, and few areas demonstrate this as clearly as the emerging field of adaptation science.

My own work in species conservation and biogeography shows how climate change adaptation bridges the experimental sciences with ethics and policy. Adaptation asks academics to partner with communities to understand what resilience means and successful interventions look like. When we ponder and test adaptation strategies, we also question long-held assumptions about nature and ourselves. And we are granted an opportunity to raise new, sometimes controversial, ideas (e.g., assisted migration) and examine them in a new light.

If that sounds like an exciting journey—and you’re ready to think about new things in new ways with new people—you may have a role to play in this emerging field too.