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Facing the challenges of global climate regulation, compliance and innovation: Presentations from a workshop on climate risk

This article provides presentations made during a workshop on climate risk, which focused on "Facing the Challenges of Global Climate Regulation, Compliance and Innovation."

Introduction

The premise of this two day 1st Annual International Technical Workshop on Climate Risk (held in Maine, USA, 20-21 October, 2016) was that long before the Paris Agreement, scientists, engineers, business men and women, public officials, academicians and non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) throughout the US and the world were hard at work in trying to solve the myriad of problems associated with anthropogenic climate change. The legislative force of the Montreal Protocol is now in support of the Agreement’s key emission reduction goals. It was time for the seasoned leaders who implemented the Protocol, the world’s most successful international treaty for the protection of the atmosphere, to share their knowledge and wisdom with the next generation of policy makers, technical professionals, and graduate/undergraduate educators before that expertise was lost. The purpose of bringing these various communities of practice together was to:

  • Leverage the many successes to date to inspire future innovations through ‘lessons learned’;
  • Ensure that new atmospheric environmental regulations are timely communicated and economically executed; and
  • Identify business opportunities for related sustainable development.

Based on contributors’ expertise and the multidisciplinary nature of climate change, Workshop topics ranged from an update on the outbreak of the Zika virus to design modifications of drainage systems in response to increases in extreme weather events. Material was consequently organized into four major themes:

  • Environmental, health and societal impacts;
  • Case studies in industry and infrastructure;
  • Advances in education; and
  • Sustainability and strategic planning.

This last category, while seemingly esoteric in nature, provided Workshop participants with the opportunity to apply critical thinking methodologies to his or her own situational awareness of climate change.

Workshop results are to be published by Cambridge Scholars under the title, “Demystifying Climate Risk: A Practitioner’s Guide”.

Presentations

The workshop hosted numerous presentations as below.

You can find the speaker biographies and presentation abstracts here.

You can download the individual presentations via the links provided here.

  • Beth Ahern: Maine Conservation Voters (MCV)
  • Dr. Stephen O. Andersen: The Reduction of Global Warming Potential (GWP) in Automotive Design: Benefits of Secondary Loop Mobile Air Conditioner (SL-MAC)
  • [Keynote] Dr. Charles Benjamin Beard: Update on the Zika Virus Outbreak: Communiqué from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
  • [Keynote] Dr. Amy S. Cannon: Green Chemistry: Chemical solutions to global challenges
  • Jeff Cohen: Preventing Emissions of Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) Using Market Mechanisms
  • Annie Cox: Better Safe than Sorry – Increasing Resilience in Maine’s outhern coastal communities through dialogue
  • Laura Dorle: The Importance of Organizing Unlikely Allies to Fight Climate Change
  • Cate Fox-Lent and Igor Linkov: Climate Resilience Assessment: A matrix approach to complex, integrated systems that can lead to aggregated scores for tracking, comparison or identifying gaps in capacity
  • Dr. Ann Goodman: Adapting to Change: The Business of Climate Resilience
  • Sherry Huber and Alison Truesdale: Use of Carbon Credit Programs by Maine Landowners
  • Barbara and Dr. Ed Kanegsberg: Thinking Outside the Box and Outside the Periodic Table
  • Mark Klingenstein: Drainage Infrastructure Design in Anticipation of Increases in Intense Precipitation: Use of ‘downscaling’ methods to adjust Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves
  • Michael Kolian: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Atmospheric Programs: Leveraging science to effectively communicate climate change impacts and risks
  • John Paul Kusz: Designing into the Anthropocene: An exploration of strategies in restoration, mitigation and adaptation to counter the effects of our presence
  • Dr. Jason Marshall: Case Studies of Solvent Substitution in Massachusetts Industries: Process-specific testing and the recording of test results in a database are critical to the timely and successful adoption of alternatives
  • Dr. Andreas Muehlbauer: The Impact of Climate Change on Extreme Precipitation and Flooding in the United States and How Businesses Can Prepare Now
  • Dr. Paul Perkins: Death by Degrees: The health crisis of climate change in Maine
  • Steve Norris and Jim Unmack: Building Resilience into Production While Reducing Energy Requirements
  • Erika Spanger-Siegfried: Principles for Sound, Equitable, and Ambitious Climate Adaptation
  • Bethany Taylor: Ecological and Infectious Disease Impacts of Hydropower Projects
  • Terry Thompson: Quantifying Climate Risk to Powerplant Cooling and Generating Capacity
  • Erik Tucker: NASA’s Supply Chain and Climate Risk Management: Exploratory Efforts
  • Dylan Voorhees: Natural Resource Council of Maine (NRCM)
  • Sharon Wells: Environmental Justice and Climate Change – Policy in Action
  • Professor Bethany Woodworth: Teaching Climate Change Across the Curriculum
Paul VanDerWerf via Flickr”>

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