ASTRA Lecture Series: Evan Fraser - Food Security and Climate Change: Disciplinary Problems and Interdisciplinary Solutions | College of Arts

ASTRA Lecture Series: Evan Fraser - Food Security and Climate Change: Disciplinary Problems and Interdisciplinary Solutions

Date and Time

Location

MacKinnon 020

Details

 

Presented by ASTRA, College of Arts and College of Biological Science

Evan Fraser, Department of Geography, University of Guelph

Evan Fraser has a BA in anthropology, an MSc in forestry both from the University of Toronto.  His PhD was in environmental studies and agriculture from UBC.  He did a post doc, also at UBC, at the Liu Institute for Global Studies before moving to the UK where he worked for seven years at the University of Leeds School of Earth and Environment.  He moved to Guelph this past summer to take up a Canadian Research Chair in the department of geography.
 
Abstract of Talk:

Current research about how climate change may affect food security is divided into two broad camps.  The first, which is drawn mostly from the natural sciences, uses mathematical models of crop productivity to assess climate change impacts in terms of changes in productivity.  The second, which is dominated by social scientists, tends to favour qualitative methods as a way of assessing how climate change may affect livelihood strategies and access to resources.   This talk will explore the strengths and limits of both approaches and present results from two multi-year research studies where (1) socio-economic insights have been used to improve the precision of crop-climate models and (2) livelihoods based case studies have been modeled using mathematical tools to develop climate change policy scenarios.  In the last part of the talk, the strengths and weaknesses of combining qualitative and quantitative methods will be discussed.