Title: What On Earth Is Going On? Global Reset & the Future of Hope
Time: 2021 November 17, 13:30 Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Speaker: Robert Sandford
Link to ZOOM Chat during presentation…
Summary:
Despite debates and high profile wagers, time has shown that the Club of Rome was right about limits to growth. We find ourselves now in a very dangerous time. The risk at that moment is that our society will lapse into some different but still functionally unaltered version of what we had before the pandemic which would be a disaster leading only to the next disasters. One crisis does not end simply because of the arrival of another. There are a lot of problems backed up behind the COVID dam, not the least of which being ecological overshoot and climate change and the attendant threat of widespread societal collapse, issues that cannot be addressed without coherence and consensus within a currently internally divided global community. This presentation will argue that it is entirely possible to restore the world and bring about climate stability. We know what to do and how to do it, but as COP26 revealed, we are rapidly running out of time before, by way of our needs and numbers, we push planetary boundaries beyond points of no return threatening much of life on Earth. We live in a transformational moment in which a new and better world is within our grasp. We must seize that moment before it slips through our fingers.
Biography:
“The Winston Churchill of Water”
Bob Sandford holds the Global Water Futures Chair in Water and Climate Security at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health. In this capacity, Bob was the co-author of the UN Water in the World We Want report on post-2015 global sustainable development goals relating to water. He is also lead author of Canada in the Global World, a new United Nations expert report examining the capacity of Canada’s water sector to meet and help others meet the United Nations 2030 Transforming Our World water-related Sustainable Development Goals.
In his work, Bob is committed to translating scientific research outcomes into language decision-makers can use to craft timely and meaningful public policy and to bringing international example to bear on local water issues. To this end, Bob is also senior advisor on water issues for the Interaction Council, a global public policy forum composed of more than thirty former Heads of State including Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, US President Bill Clinton, and the former Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Brundtland. Bob is also a Fellow of the Centre for Hydrology at the University of Saskatchewan and a member of Canada’s Forum for Leadership on Water (FLOW), a national water policy research group centred in Toronto. Bob is also the author, co-author or editor of more than thirty books, one of which Vanishing Glaciers: The Snows of Yesteryear & the Future Climate of the Mountain West, won the Lane Anderson award for the best science writing in Canada in 2017.
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