Discussion Series: Education and Digitalisation

Discussion Series: Education and Digitalisation

Discussion Series: Education and Digitalisation

Location: Virtual
Dates: 25 May 15:30 – 17:00 CEST
Register: https://futureearth.confetti.events/education-and-digitalisation 

Join AIMES, Earth Commission, Future Earth and WCRP for the webinar series that aims to advance the knowledge about tipping elements, irreversibility, and abrupt changes in the Earth system. The event includes two presentations on education and digitalisation.

Presentations

Moderated by Anne Goujon (IIASA).

Speaker Information:

Prof. Raya Muttarak, University of Bologna
Raya Muttarak is currently professor of Demography and the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Bologna. She has also been director of Population, Environment, and Sustainable Development at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, a cooperation between IIASA, the University of Vienna, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, since 2017. In 2022, she was appointed editor of the journal, Population and Development Review. Muttarak holds an MSc and DPhil in Sociology from the University of Oxford, UK, and pursued her postdoctoral research at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, winning first the Max Weber fellowship, followed by the Marie Curie Intra-European Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her research focuses mainly on the reciprocal relationship between population and the environment. Her current research projects include differential impacts of climate variability on human health, migration, and child welfare; climate change attitudes, voting patterns, and environmental behaviors; and modeling and forecasting future vulnerability and adaptive capacity. She is also actively engaged in empirical studies on a variety of topics ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic and gender disparities, estimates of migration intention to female empowerment, and domestic violence. She has published widely in the field of population dynamics, environment, and sustainable development, including publications in high impact journals such as Science, Nature Climate Change, Nature Sustainability, The Lancet, and Global Environmental Change.

 

Prof. Ridhi Kashyap, University of Oxford
Prof. Kashyap’s research spans different areas of demography, including questions linked to mortality and population health, gender inequality, marriage and family, and migration and ethnicity. They have worked on the demographic manifestations and implications of son preference as one of the most striking ways in which gender inequality interacts with demographic behaviours. In the areas of family demography, I have been studying the relationship between educational expansion, gender norms, and marriage and partnership patterns in different contexts. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have worked on different aspects of the social and demographic impacts of the pandemic, including topics such as the pandemic’s mortality impacts in cross-national perspective and the role of trust in science for public health. A central interest of their research has been to leverage computational approaches for demographic research within the growing area of Digital and Computational Demography, and forge links between demography and a growing interdisciplinary community of computational social science. Within the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, they co-lead the strand on Digital and Computational Science. From a methodological standpoint, they are interested in how computational methods (e.g agent-based models, microsimulation, machine learning) and new data streams (e.g digital trace data from the web and social media), can contribute to the study of population dynamics and social inequalities. An example of this is provided on www.digitalgendergaps.org, where we use social media data together with survey data to nowcast global digital gender inequalities in internet and mobile access, a global sustainable development goal (SDG) indicator for which there is a significant data gap. From a substantive standpoint, they are interested in the impacts of mobile and internet technologies, and digitalisation more broadly, on demographic and sustainable development outcomes, such as gender inequalities, population health and empowerment.
3rd Annual Virtual Land Data Assimilation Workshop: Recent Technical Developments in Land Data Assimilation

3rd Annual Virtual Land Data Assimilation Workshop: Recent Technical Developments in Land Data Assimilation

Organizers: Natasha MacBean (1), Jana Kolassa (2), Andy Fox (3), Tristan Quaife (4), Hannah Liddy (5)
(1) Western University, (2) NASA GMAO, (3) Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation, (4) University of Reading, (5) Columbia University/NASA GISS
† Organized by the AIMES Land Data Assimilation Working Group

Workshop Overview

The 3rd annual Land Data Assimilation (DA) Community Virtual Workshop on “Recent Technical Developments in Land Data Assimilation” will take place Tuesday to Wednesday 20th-21st June 9am-1pm ET / 16:00-19:00 CEST.

This workshop is focused on the technical challenges of land data assimilation. To strengthen communication between modeling groups, this workshop will bring together land DA scientists to highlight a range of DA methods used within the community, address challenges facing different modeling groups, and identify strategies for addressing those challenges. The outcome of this workshop is to increase collaboration and coordination within the land DA community to tackle technical challenges and promote the routine use of DA tools in the wider modeling community. To learn more about the outcomes of previous workshops, please check out the following:

Learn more about the Land DA Community here: https://land-da-community.github.io.

 

Workshop Format

This meeting will take place virtually and is free of charge. We encourage those in other time zones to register their attendance and submit an abstract for a poster. We are working on a plan to facilitate asynchronous participation from regions that cannot attend the main meeting due to time zone differences.

Call for posters: In addition to registration, we also still welcome abstracts for poster submissions. The posters should address the technical challenges associated with developing land DA systems emphasizing work-in-progress. Abstracts can be submitted through the registration link below.

Our intention is to create a workshop and community that is inclusive of participants from all backgrounds and a range of career stages. If there are colleagues who not only represent a relevant area of expertise but may also be earlier in their careers and/or from groups historically marginalized in STEM that you recommend to attend this workshop, please encourage them to register.

We are looking forward to continuing to build the Land DA Community and to seeing your abstracts!

The deadline to register is Tuesday, 13 June 2023. 

Workshop Agenda

TUESDAY, 20 JUNE 2023
8:50 EDT/
14:50 CEST
Coffee/tea time to join the conversation early and test out your camera and microphone.
9:00 EDT/
15:00 CEST
Welcome from the Co-Chairs: Introduction to the workshop context and goals 
9:10 EDT/
15:10 CEST
Speaker 1: Natalie Douglas (University of Reading) – Using the 4DEnVar Data Assimilation Technique in Land Surface Models
9:25 EDT/
15:25 CEST
Q&A 
9:35 EDT/
15:35 CEST
Speaker 2: Thomas Kaminski (Inversion Lab) – Terrestrial Carbon Community Assimilation System
9:50 EDT/
15:50 CEST
Q&A 
10:00 EDT/
16:00 CEST
Speaker 3: Ewan Pinnington (ECMWF) – Technical Aspects of the ECMWF Land Data Assimilation System
10:15 EDT/
16:15 CEST
Q&A 
10:25 EDT/
16:25 CEST
Break (10 minutes)
10:35 EDT/
16:35 CEST
Speaker 4: Shahryar Khalique Ahmad (NASA GSFC) – Contrasting Flash Droughts Captured by Soil Moisture and Vegetation Data Assimilation
10:50 EDT/
16:50 CEST
Q&A
11:00 EDT/
17:00 CEST
Speaker 5: Timothy Lahmers (NASA GSFC) – Coupled surface hydrology and data assimilation: Applications and technical implementation of the coupled LIS/WRF-Hydro system
11:15 EDT/
17:15 CEST
Q&A 
11:25 EDT/
17:25 CEST
Speaker 6: Rolf Reichle (NASA GSFC) – Systematic Errors in Simulated L-Band Brightness Temperature in the SMAP Level-4 Soil Moisture Analysis 
11:40 EDT/ 17:40 CEST Q&A 
11:50 EDT/
17:50 CEST
Break (5 minutes)
11:55 EDT/
17:55 CEST
Poster Session
13:00 EDT/
19:00 CEST
END

 

WEDNESDAY, 21 JUNE 2023
8:50 EDT/
14:50 CEST
Coffee/tea time to join the conversation early and test out your camera and microphone.
9:00 EDT/
15:00 CEST
Welcome from the Co-Chairs: Introduction to Day 2
9:05 EDT/
15:05 CEST
Speaker 1: Yao Liu (Northumbria University) – TBD
9:15 EDT/
15:15 CEST
Q&A 
9:25 EDT/
15:25 CEST
Speaker 2: Elodie Salmon (LSCE) – Spatial Heterogeneity of Methane Emissions from Peatlands in the Northern Hemisphere 
9:40 EDT/
15:40 CEST
Q&A 
9:50 EDT/
15:50 CEST
Speaker 3: Feng Tao (Tsinghua University) – Convergence in simulating global soil organic carbon by structurally different models after data-model fusion
10:05 EDT/
16:05 CEST
Q&A 
10:15 EDT/
16:15 CEST
Break (10 minutes)
10:25 EDT/
16:25 CEST

Speaker 4: Xu Shan (TU Delft) – Constraining Plant Water Dynamics in Land Surface Model Through Assimilating ASCAT Normalized Backscatter and Slope at ISMN Stations Over Western Europe 

10:40 EDT/
16:40 CEST
Q&A
10:50 EDT/
16:50 CEST
Speaker 5: Nina Raoult (University of Exeter) – Is a steady-state relaxation parameter a viable solution to the spinup problem in land data assimilation?
11:05 EDT/
17:05 CEST
Q&A 
11:15 EDT/
17:15 CEST
Speaker 6: Bo Qu (Université de Montréal) – Optimizing Maximum Carboxylation Rate for North America’s Boreal Forests in a Terrestrial Biosphere Model
11:30 EDT/
17:30 CEST
Q&A
11:40 EDT/
17:40 CEST
Speaker 7: Linnia Hawkins (Columbia University) – Designing emulation tasks that preserve physical relationships for use in land model calibration
11:55 EDT/
17:55 CEST
Q&A
12:05 EDT/
18:05 CEST
Break (5 minutes)
12:10 EDT/
18:10 CEST
Plenary
13:00 EDT/
19:00 CEST
END

 

Discussion Series: Climate extremes and impacts on the terrestrial carbon-cycle and fires

Discussion Series: Climate extremes and impacts on the terrestrial carbon-cycle and fires

Discussion Series: Climate extremes and impacts on the terrestrial carbon-cycle and fires

Location: Virtual
Dates: 20 April 2023, 15:00-16:30 CEST
Register: https://climateextremes.confetti.events/ 

Join AIMES, Earth Commission, Future Earth and WCRP for the webinar series that aims to advance the knowledge about tipping elements, irreversibility, and abrupt changes in the Earth system. The event includes two presentations on extreme events.

Presentations

Moderated by Pierre Friedlingstein (University of Exeter).

 

Speaker Information

Dr. Ana Bastos, Max Planck Institute

Ana Bastos leads the Climate-ecosystem-disturbance interactions group at the Department of Biogeochemical Integration (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry). She obtained her PhD in Geophysical and Geoinformation Science by the University of Lisbon in 2015. Her overarching scientific goal is to better understand inter-annual to long-term variability in the global carbon-cycle. To do this, her research bridges the disciplines of atmospheric science, ecology and biogeochemistry, from both observation-based and modelling perspectives. Specific topics include land-atmosphere interactions, the role of internal climate variability and ocean-atmosphere-land teleconnections in controlling carbon-cycle dynamics, the impacts of climate extremes on ecosystem functioning and ecosystem disturbance regimes. She is currently co-leading the “REgional Carbon Cycle Assessment and Processes”, phase 2 (RECCAP-2) project, an activity of the Global Carbon Project aimed at improving our ability to constrain regional to national carbon budgets to inform the global stocktake process of the Paris Agreement. In 2022, she received the Early Career Scientist Award by the Biogeosciences Division of the European Geosciences Union and was granted an ERC Starting Grant to advance understanding about forest vulnerability to compound extremes under climate change.

 

Dr. Guido van der Werf, Vrije University Amsterdam

Guido van der Werf received his MSc. (2001) and PhD (2006) from the Vrije Universiteit, the latter based on a 3 year internship at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He received fellowships from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) in 2006 (Veni) and 2014 (Vici) and a starting grant from the European Research Council (ERC) in 2011. Together with colleagues in the U.S. he developed the Global Fire Emissions Database and he is since 2014 amongst the 1% most frequently cited Earth scientists. Van der Werf aims to understand how the global carbon cycle interacts with the climate system. His group focuses specifically on deforestation and forest fires. Combining biogeochemical modeling, satellite data, and atmospheric modeling enables them to quantify fire and deforestation emissions, and these are the basis for exploring their response to and influence on climatic, demographic, and socio-economical changes. In addition, they use satellite data to test ecological hypotheses over large scales. Van der Werf teaches the Global Change course for Bachelor students Earth Sciences and Earth and Economics students, and coordinates the Master’s course Global Biogeochemical Cycles for Earth Sciences students

Discussion Series: Entering Social Tipping: Norms, Agency and Scales

Discussion Series: Entering Social Tipping: Norms, Agency and Scales

Discussion Series: Entering Social Tipping: Norms, Agency and Scales

Location: Virtual
Dates: 30 March 2023, 15:00-16:30 CEST
Register: https://entering-social-tipping-norms-agency-and-scales.confetti.events/ 

Join AIMES, Earth Commission, Future Earth and WCRP for the webinar series that aims to advance the knowledge about tipping elements, irreversibility, and abrupt changes in the Earth system. The event includes two presentations on social tipping points.

Presentations

 

Speaker Information

Dr. Avit Bhowmik, AIMES SSC Member, Karlstad University
Dr. Avit Bhowmik is an Assistant Professor of Risk and Environmental Studies. He is the Lead Modeller of the Exponential Roadmap project and a Senior Research Fellow at Project Drawdown, both of which consolidate solutions and model their implementation strategies to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
His current research focuses on social tipping points for climate mitigation and sustainability transformation. He explores innovative and existing climate solutions, and studies how they could be implemented to exponentially reduce greenhouse gas emissions and abruptly transform societies to sustainability. He also models the successful implementation pathways for UN Sustainable Development Goals. He is an author of the first Exponential Climate Action Roadmap Report released in the Global Climate Action Summit 2018. He is also an author of the first World in 2050 Report released in the UN High Level Political Forum in 2018.
Dr. Viktoria Spaiser, University of Leeds
Dr. Viktoria Spaiser has a background in Sociology (PhD, Bielefeld University, Germany, 2012), Political Science (MA in Conflict, Security and Development, King’s College London, UK, 2008) and Computer Science (German Diploma, University of Applied Sciences Trier, Germany, 2013). She is a visiting researcher in the Computational Social Science Research Group at ETH Zurich in 2012 and a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies Stockholm (2012-2014) and at the Department of Mathematics, Uppsala University in Sweden (2014-2015). Between August 2015 and July 2020 she was a University Academic Fellow in Political Science Informatics at the University of Leeds, POLIS. Since July 2020 she is an Associate Professor at POLIS. She is also affiliated with the Priestley International Centre for Climate and the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA).
Event Recap: Creating the Behavioural Models of Land Systems Working Group

Event Recap: Creating the Behavioural Models of Land Systems Working Group

Workshop Recap: Creating the Behavioural Models of Land Systems Working Group

Date: 16 February 2023 at 14:00 GMT
Organisers: James Millington (working group coordinator), Calum Brown, Tatiana Filatova, Birgit Müller, Derek Robinson, Mark Rounsevell, Maja Schlüter

Workshop overview

On Thursday, 16 February, the BeModeLS GLP/AIMES working group held their first online webinar to help shape the group’s aims and activities. After an overview introduction from lead co-ordinator James Millington (slides here), the 32 participants broke into groups to discuss key questions about priorities and perspectives (notes here). The working group steering committee will now work with the feedback to develop future plans. For those that were unable to join the meeting, feel free to add your comments to this open padlet (or email the lead co-ordinator). Look out for news about future activities in due course. 

Watch the video

View the workshop materials

Partners

Funders

Discussion Series: Governing Earth System Tipping Points in Times of Multiple Crises

Discussion Series: Governing Earth System Tipping Points in Times of Multiple Crises

Discussion Series: Governing Earth System Tipping Points in Times of Multiple Crises

Location: Virtual
Dates: 27 February 2023, 14:00-15:30 CET
Register: https://governance-of-climate-tipping-points.confetti.events/

Join AIMES, Earth Commission, Future Earth and WCRP for the webinar series that aims to advance the knowledge about tipping elements, irreversibility, and abrupt changes in the Earth system. The event includes two presentations on the governance of tipping points.

Presentations

Moderated by Solveig Crompton (University of Stavanger).

Speaker Information

 

Dr. Dirk Messner, UBA/German Environment Agency

Dr. Dirk Messner has been the President of the German Environment Agency since 2020. He previously served as Director of the Institute for Environment and Human Security of United Nations University (UNU-EHS) in Bonn, Germany, and Vice Rector of the United Nations University (UNU). Prior to becoming Director of UNU-EHS in October 2018, Dirk had been Director of the German Development Institute from 2003-2018. Dirk is an internationally recognised expert on globalisation, global governance, transformation pathways to sustainability, decarbonisation of the global economy, sustainability and digital change, and international cooperation and societal change. Dirk has also been a member of a number of high-ranking policy advisory councils, including co-chairing the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network Germany and is member of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED).

Dr. Manjana Milkoreit, University of Oslo

Dr. Manjana Milkoreit received her Ph.D. in Global Governance from the University of Waterloo (Canada) and a Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to joining the University of Oslo, she was a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at Purdue University, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at Arizona State University’s Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. At ASU she lead the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative, an interdisciplinary effort to engage scholars, writers and the public in a conversation about the role of imagination in societal responses to climate change. Her research integrates scholarship on global environmental governance and cognitive theory to study actor motivations, beliefs and agency, institutional and policy design and effectiveness related to climate change. She is interested in challenges at the science-policy-society interface, including the use of scientific knowledge in environmental decision-making, and the role of ideologies in advancing or preventing effective societal responses to climate change. Her current research focuses on the role of future thinking (imagination) in sustainability transformations and the study of social tipping points.