- Canada Research Chair in Sustainability Governance and Innovation
- Senior Fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation
- Fellow, Balsillie School of International Affairs
- Executive Director of IC3
- Project Director of TRANSFORM
Through her research, writing, and teaching, Professor Burch explores transformative responses to climate change at the community scale, and innovative strategies for governing sustainability.
She is a Coordinating Lead Author of the Earth System Governance project’s New Directions Initiative, which is creating the Science and Implementation Plan that will inform the research of an international network of more than 3,000 environmental governance scholars over the next 10 years. She was a Coordinating Lead Author in the Second Assessment Report on Climate Change in Cities (PDF) and was a Contributing Author to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007). Professor Burch was a Visiting Research Associate at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute (2010-2013) and was awarded a Banting Fellowship for her work on sustainability innovation. Her most recent book (2014) is entitled ‘Understanding Climate Change: Science, Policy and Practice.’ She is the current Project Director of TRANSFORM, an international partnership that aims to accelerate transitions to sustainability by building capacity in the small and medium-sized enterprise sector while informing novel approaches to the governance of climate change and sustainability in local spaces.