Activities
Photo:Erik Pihl/Future Earth
This seminar arranged by 29 November 2016by GEDB and Future Earth focused on the Amazon, celebrating Volvo Environment Prize laureate Professor Carlos Nobre’s work. This iconic biome plays a key role for local moisture recycling, as well as both social and biological diversity. But the Amazon is increasingly recognized as also playing a fundamental role in stabilizing the Earth’s climate system. The seminar highlighted the importance of the Amazonian biome itself as well as examining the proximate and distal drivers underpinning the land-use change which is currently threatening the ability of this system to provide these ecosystem services to humanity, at local as well as global scales.
For copyright reasons only the first half of this seminar can be shown. It features Carlos Nobre’s full talk, introduced by Beatrice Crona and Wendy Broadgate, preceded by cello music played by Svante Henryson.
This seminar also featured:
Professor Will Steffen, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University. His talk had the title The Amazon: key component of a governed Earth? He placed the Amazon in the context of global warming and the era of the Anthropocene. You can see a video here when he addresses these subjects in another lecture, without the focus of the Amazon.
Associate Professor Martin Persson, Department of Energy and Environment, Chalmers University of Technology, whose talk was titled Trading forests: linking Amazon deforestation to global beef and soy consumption.
Associate Professor Beatrice Crona, Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, with her talk The financial sector - a distal driver impacting the Amazon?
Followed by a panel discussion moderated by Rebecca Oliver, future Earth.
The 2016 Volvo Environment Prize winner Professor Carlos Nobre is one of the world’s leading Earth System scientists and has been a pioneer in efforts to understand and protect the Amazon, one of Earth’s most important ecosystems. Professor Nobre has also led international global change research efforts, chairing the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme from 2005-2011, and linked science with policy for the Amazon in national and international arenas at the highest levels. See short film about Professor Nobres work.