School of Sustainability Seminar Series: Karen Fisher-Vanden

Capturing Cascading and Compound Climate Stressors in Interdependent Systems

Exploring risk and response behaviors is a major scientific challenge for understanding integrated impacts of climate change, landscape evolution, and the resilience of complex systems. Understanding and modeling multiscale, multisystem response options and cross-system implications requires not only an understanding of multisector teleconnections in the coupled human and Earth system, but also how interconnected systems are exposed to hazards that create vulnerabilities and risks for society and how societies respond to these risks. In this presentation, I will highlight work being done as part of the Program on Coupled Human and Earth Systems (PCHES) (www.pches.psu.edu), a transdisciplinary research consortium of nine leading universities funded under the U.S. Department of Energy's MultiSector Dynamics (MSD) program. The primary objective of the PCHES project is to answer two critical, and interrelated research questions: (1) How can we characterize and quantify the propagation of hazards (flood, water scarcity, wildfire) through the coupled human and earth system, affecting the exposure and vulnerability of populations and human built systems to these hazards? (2) How do these populations and physical systems respond to these risks and how do those responses feed back to the fully coupled, co-evolutionary human and natural Earth system?

Bio:

Karen Fisher-Vanden is Distinguished Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics and Public Policy, and Director of the Institute for Sustainable Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Science (SAFES) at Pennsylvania State University. Professor Fisher-Vanden holds a B.S in Mathematics/Computer Science and a B.A. in Economics both from UC Davis, a M.S. in Management Science from the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University. She was a Lead Author of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report Working Group III, and a previous member of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) Product Development Advisory Committee and lead author of a congressionally-mandated CCSP report on global change scenarios. She is President of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE) where she previously served on the Board of Directors, and was a member of the EPA Science Advisory Board on Economy-wide modeling. Her areas of research include economic and integrated assessment modeling for climate change impacts and policy analysis. She has led a number of large externally-funded research programs and is currently co-Director and Principal Investigator of the Program on Coupled Human and Earth Systems (PCHES), a large Cooperative Research Agreement with the US Department of Energy.