Sarah Burch, PhD is a professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo, Canada, and holds a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Sustainability Governance and Innovation.
She is the Executive Director of the Waterloo Climate Institute, a Lead Author of the United Nations’ Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and helped to lead expert input into the development of Canada’s first National Adaptation Strategy. Her research uncovers transformative responses to climate change at the community scale, the political and justice dimensions of energy transitions, and the unique contributions that small businesses can make to this solving these complex challenges. She leads the international partnership-based research project TRANSFORM: Accelerating sustainability entrepreneurship experiments in local spaces, and is the Director of the Sustainability Policy Research on Urban Transformations (SPROUT) Lab.
Dr. Burch holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute. She was named to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars in 2017, one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40TM in 2018, and one of Canada’s Clean 50 in 2021.
Her most recent book is entitled ‘Understanding Climate Change: Science, Policy and Practice,’ and she taught the first Massive Open Online Course on climate change, which reached thousands over students in over 130 countries.