Thinking about climate change impacts in your community? What if you could look into the future to consider different risks and options? May 7, 2008

Who: Dr. Stephen Sheppard
When: Wednesday, May 7th
Where: UBC Robson Square- room C100
Time: Registration 6pm
Speaker Event 630pm
Cost: members-$5, non-members-$10

Stephen Sheppard: Visualizing local climate change impacts and policies with GVRD communities:

Dr. Sheppard will be presenting on the Local Climate Change Visioning Project, which envisions alternative climate change futures in B.C. The project uses GIS and 3D visualization to engage local experts and decision-makers in envisioning four dramatic yet defensible local climate change futures. This project probes the possibilities to bring global climate science to people's backyards to encourage local engagement for planning for responses and to motivate individual behavioural change.

The project is attempting to downscale global climate information to the local level, using visualization technology of people's communities in order to make alternative climate futures more meaningful to people and their lives. Dr. Sheppard will take the audience through some of the science used, the visualizations, and the results that have been recently collected. He will discuss whether this type of information and medium of delivery increases people's awareness of the issues, affects them in a more emotional way, and whether it motivates behavioural change in any measurable way.

Dr. Stephen Sheppard teaches in sustainable landscape planning, aesthetics, and visualization in the Faculty of Forestry and Landscape Architecture programme at UBC. He received a BA/MA in Agricultural and Forest Sciences at Oxford, a MSc. in Forestry at UBC, and a Ph.D. in Environmental Planning at UC. Berkeley. He directs the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning (CALP), a research group using perception-testing and interactive 3D visualization tools to support public awareness-building, policy change, and collaborative planning on climate change and sustainability issues.

Stephen has over 25 years' experience in environmental assessment and public participation internationally. He has written or co-written two books on visual simulation, is a contributor to the BC Chapter of the Canadian National Assessment of climate change impacts and adaptation, and was a reviewer of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Recent research interests lie in visioning and communicating local climate change futures, public perceptions of sustainability, and ethical visualization techniques.

Cost: members-$5, non-members-$10

Please send an email to RSVP your spot to [email protected] no later than Monday May 5th

Official Website: http://cepvancouver.org