WaterTalk: From planetary boundaries to ecosystem services: Guiding development on a changing planet

Thursday, December 10, 2020 10:00 am - 11:00 am EST (GMT -05:00)

As part of the Water Institute's WaterTalks lecture series, Elena Bennett, professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Sustainability Science at McGill University, presents, "From planetary boundaries to ecosystem services: Guiding development on a changing planet."

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The current scale, rate, and intensity of anthropogenic change is unprecedented, and has evoked broad discussion about how these changes will affect the future of the planet. Indeed, we are unnecessarily threatening our own security by undermining natural capital and the provision of ecosystem services, especially in working landscapes like agricultural ones. In this talk, I will show how the science of ecosystem services can be used to guide natural resource management while providing for human well-being, focusing on examples having to do with interactions between agriculture and water quality.

Speaker bio

Elena Bennett
Dr. Elena Bennett is Professor and CRC (Tier 1) Chair in Sustainability Science at McGill University. Her work focuses on the interactions among ecosystem services and how we can manage these interactions for multifunctional working landscapes. She was the leader of the Montérégie Connection that worked with stakeholders to understand the role of landscape connectivity in the provision of about a dozen ecosystem services and how those might change across a range of future scenarios. She is now the director of NSERC ResNet, a Strategic Network designed to improve the monitoring, modelling, and managing of ecosystem services in working landscapes across Canada. Her most recent work focuses on using radical transformative experiments in society as ‘seeds’ to improve storytelling and sensemaking about how we might achieve a “good Anthropocene”. Dr. Bennett was a Leopold Leadership Fellow (2012), and a Trottier Public Policy Professor (2013-2014).  She won the Macdonald Campus Award for (Undergraduate) Teaching Excellence in 2012 and the Carrie M. Derick Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision in 2013. She was an NSERC EWR Steacie Fellow (2017 -2019)


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