Climate change put to expert panel

Climate change put to expert panel

University of Waikato academics, a climate scientist and a former Green Party co-leader will take part in a panel discussion as part of “The Greatest Climate Show on Earth” next week.

The event is designed to inform and inspire people to take action with their communities to prevent climate change.

The panel will be hosted by University of Waikato Environmental Planning Professor Iain White. Professor White’s research links the natural and built environments. He has researched extensively into the impacts of climate change and how societies may change to mitigate and adapt. He has worked with a number of groups in New Zealand and internationally, including local and national government, multi-national companies, insurers, community organisations and the European Union.

Panelists include Waikato University’s Associate Professor Linda Te Aho and Professor Al Gillespie.

Associate Professor Te Aho researches and teaches Māori and indigenous legal issues. As a member of a Ministerial advisory group, she provides advice on the proposed reforms to Te Ture Whenua Māori 1993 (the Māori Land Act). Associate Professor Te Aho was appointed by Waikato-Tainui as a guardian for the co-management of the Waikato River ecosystem to develop the long term vision for its holistic restoration. This year she was commissioned to provide expert technical advice to the Ministry for the Environment on the current proposals to reform the Resource Management Act 1991.

Professor Gillespie’s latest works are Waste Policy: International Regulation, Comparative and Contextual Perspectives; International Environmental Law, Policy and Ethics and the Causes of War: 1000-1600 (Volume II). He has also written over 40 academic articles. Professor Gillespie has been awarded a Rotary International Scholarship, Fulbright Fellowship, Rockefeller Fellowship, and the New Zealand Law Foundation International Research Fellowship. He was the first New Zealander to be named Rapporteur for the World Heritage Convention, involving international environmental diplomacy under the auspice of UNESCO. He has also been engaged in policy formation for the United Nations, the Commonwealth Secretariat, and governmental, commercial and non-governmental organisations in New Zealand, Australia, United States, United Kingdom, Ireland and Switzerland.

Also on the panel are climate scientist Dr Jim Salinger and former Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons.

Dr Salinger is based at the School of Environment at the University of Auckland. He was the Ernst Frohlich Fellow at CSIRO in Hobart Australia. For more than 35 years Dr Salinger has studied climate change and variability in New Zealand, linking climate trends with natural and human causes. He was a Nobel Peace Prize contributor to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to the 2007 report.

Jeanette Fitzsimons CNZM retired five years ago after 14 years as co-leader of the Green Party. She now works towards a global, national and community response to climate change - a topic she has worked on since she lectured at the University of Auckland 25 years ago. She is a member of the organising group of Coal Action Network Aotearoa which is working to phase out coal, the most abundant of the fossil fuels.

The panel will address why people should be concerned about climate change - what's it all about? What's really going to happen to us and to Earth if we don't take action? Why do you think significant action hasn't occurred? What is the most important thing that our government needs to do to prevent climate change? What can I do as an individual and with my community to prevent climate change? Questions will also be taken from the floor.

As well as the panel discussion, there will be local music and slam poetry.

The event is at 7pm on Tuesday 10 November at The Atrium, Wintec City Campus, Hamilton.

Register online by or call in to the Waikato Environment Centre. Unwaged: $5, waged: $10, flush: $20. For more information visit http://www.envirocentre.org.nz/page/the-greatest-climate-show/

ENDS

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