Resilience to Climate Change, Past and Present Keynote Address
Public Keynote: Can the Past Reveal how Policymakers Should Respond to Global Warming?
John Haldon, Director, Climate Change and History Research Initiative at Princeton University.
Marcy Rockman, Founder/Director, Lifting Rocks LLC, Associate Research Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland.
Pedro Conceicao, Director, Human Development Report Office, United Nations Development Programme.
This keynote will close the first day of a workshop of authors developing an edited book that, for the first time, surveys how populations were resilient and adaptive in the face of climate changes from the Last Glacial Maximum to the present period of rapid, human-caused warming. The handbook includes authors from many disciplines and six continents, and the chapters explore the experience of climate change in diverse times and places. Authors aim not only to present case studies of resilient populations but also to identify common “pathways” by which populations developed resilience: pathways that may aid in the development of effective climate adaptation policy.
Support from the Georgetown ECo Impact Program and Georgetown’s Mortara Center will allow handbook authors and editors to gather, virtually and in person, for this unique, two-day workshop. The sessions will be organized geographically, but one purpose of the workshop will be to identify themes that connect the chapters, and may permit the authors to organize the handbook thematically. After the completion of geographically-themed sessions, authors will all gather to identify these common themes.