The Geography Colloquium series presents Dr. Jon Barnett of the University of Melbourne on “Climate Change and Human Security: Key Findings from the 5th Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” on Friday, Oct. 10, from 3:05-4:30 p.m. in Walter Hall 235.
The colloquium is co-sponsored by Ohio University’s Environmental Studies Program, the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs, the Sustainability Studies curricular theme, and the Department of Geography.
Barnett is Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Geography at The University of Melbourne. Jon is a political geographer whose research seeks to understand the social impacts of and responses to environmental change in Australia, East Asia and the South Pacific. Jon is a Lead Author for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and co-editor of Global Environmental Change.
Jon Barnett
The issue of climate change and security is contentious: there are strident debates about methods and evidence among researchers, and equally strident debates about the securitisation of climate change among members of the United Nations. Government members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change requested that the current state of scientific knowledge on this topic be assessed in its most recent Assessment Report. Given attacks on the credibility of the IPCC in recent years, the epistemological and theoretical challenges of research on climate change and security, and high-level political interest in the findings of the IPCC on this topic, this assessment was not without its challenges. This seminar reports on the process and outcomes of this assessment, and in doing so reflects more broadly on the state of knowledge about the social consequences of climate change, and on the IPCC’s procedures for assessing this knowledge.
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