Speakers / Counselors
Cassandra Brooke
Manager
Climate Change Adaptation Science
WWF
Dr Cassandra Brooke has worked in the climate change area for over ten years. At the UNEP Risø Centre on Energy, Climate and Sustainable Development (Denmark) her work included expert review of national communications to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, implementation of the Global Network on Energy for Sustainable Development, capacity building for carbon emissions trading, and assessment of biodiversity impacts and adaptation in conservation management. Upon returning to her home country of Australia, she worked with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, where she focussed on integrated vulnerability and adaptation (V&A) assessment and capacity building for adaptation. Cassandra has a PhD in geography from the Environmental Change Institute of Oxford University. She is currently managing WWF Australia's adaptation activities, and is the terrestrial expert for the WWF EpiCenter of Adaptation and Resilience. Her current interests include design of regional V&A projects, landscape connectivity, scenario planning for conservation, building social-ecological resilience, and the emerging role of NGOs in adaptation.
Claire Carlton
Manager
Climate Witness Programme
WWF
Claire Carlton has over 13 years of experience working in the environment sector specialising in biodiversity conservation and mitigation of climate change impacts.
A large part of her work has been developing mechanisms for the scientific community to work in close collaboration with the land managers in gathering data as well developing and implementing improved land management practices. Most of her work has been based in Australia working with all sectors of government, research institutions, peak conservation organisations, industry, community groups and private land managers.
She has extensive experience in developing, designing and coordinating scientific flora and fauna surveys bringing the scientists together with unskilled members of the public to collect critical base line species data.
More recently Claire has been involved in developing new opportunities for custom carbon offset projects involving research institutions, industry government and conservation groups.
Michael Case
Climate Change Research Scientist
WWF
Michael is a climate change research scientist with WWF. He joined the Climate Change team in December 2004 and is responsible for supporting WWF with climate change-related science and updates. He specializes in forest ecology and climate change impacts and hopes to increase awareness and synergy between WWF programs. Before joining WWF, Michael was a research analyst for the Western Mountain Initiative (WMI), an integration of research programs that study global change in the mountain ecosystems of the western United States. Michael has a graduate degree in Ecosystem Analysis from the University of Washington-Seattle and an undergraduate degree in Forest Management, with an emphasis in Conservation Biology and Environmental Law from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
Gary Cook
Deputy Director
ICLEI--Local Governments for Sustainability USA
Gary joined ICLEI as Deputy Director in June 2007, and manages the strategic program and the development of ICLEI's Regional Capacity Centers, and is responsible for the coordination of alliances and partnerships at the national level.
Immediately prior to joining ICLEI, Gary was Executive Director of US Climate Action Network(USCAN), where he led a national coalition of organizations focused on global warming education and policy advocacy at both the federal and international level. He previously worked as a Staff Attorney for the Center for International Environmental Law, and as Climate Policy Director for Greenpeace USA.
Molly Cross
Climate Change Scientist
Wildlife Conservation Society
Molly is an ecologist whose research focuses on ecosystem responses to climate change and biodiversity loss. She is currently a Climate Change Scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, examining the impacts of climate change on wildlife habitat conservation efforts. The project's primary goal is to bring together experts in the fields of climate change, ecology, conservation planning and land management to develop a framework for approaching climate change adaptation through on-the-ground conservation practices in the Intermountain West of North America. Molly conducted her Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley, measuring ecosystem responses to climate warming-induced plant species loss in a sub-alpine meadow in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.
Jonathan Gelbard
Executive Director
Conservation Value Institute
Dr. Jonathan L. Gelbard is a conservation biologist and sustainability expert with a background in communication. He is the founder and Executive Director of the Conservation Value Institute and the National Director of Sustainability for the Green Apple Festival. Dr. Gelbard holds a Ph.D. in ecology from UC Davis and a Master's Degree in environmental management from Duke University. He has completed projects in ecology and land management with The Nature Conservancy and ranchers in New Mexico and Arizona, with agencies and environmental groups in Colorado, with academics, ranchers, and agencies in California, with consulting firms and environmental groups from Oregon to New York, and was a "counselor" at WWF's inaugural Climate Camp. Gelbard is an accomplished ecological researcher and writer, has authored multiple scientific and non-scientific publications, and maintains the blog, "Conservation Value Notes". He is a dynamic public speaker and his work has been the subject of articles in the San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, Associated Press, American Museum of Natural History, and High Country News.
Lara Hansen
Chief Climate Change Scientist
Director of the EpiCenter of Climate Adaptation and Resilience Building
WWF
Dr. Lara Hansen has directed research on the biological effects of global change since 1990. Her primary focus is the redesign of conservation and conservation strategies to incorporate responses to climate change. She is the principal investigator on numerous studies designed to assess the effects of climate change and evaluate possible adaptation strategies for responding to these effects around the world.
She is the Chief Climate Change Scientist for WWF and the founding Director of the EpiCenter of Climate Adaptation and Resilience Building. Her position involves not only helping to develop the new conservaiton paradigm that includes the reality of climate change, but she works to convey the urgency to take action on climate change to a broader audience by offering testimony to the U.S. Senate, teaching at academic institutions, and speaking with media outlets.
She is the lead author/editor of a key text on the issue of natural system adaptation to climate change, Buying Time: A User's Manual for Building Resistance and Resilience to Climate Change in Natural Systems. She is also the creator of Climate Camp and hopes you find it a productive, creative and enjoyable process.
Jennie Hoffman
Climate Adaptation Specialist - Marine
WWF
Jennie Hoffman's focus at WWF is on developing and supporting projects that increase the resistance and resilience of marine ecosystems and the communities that depend on them to climate change. This includes the development of new projects as well as working to incorporate climate change considerations into existing conservation plans. In conjunction with other members of the EpiCenter for Climate Adaptation, Jennie works within the WWF network and in the wider conservation community to build capacity for assessing and reducing vulnerability to climate change. She welcomes communication with WWF staff and other conservation practitioners interested in discussing ways to include climate change considerations in conservation work.
Prior to coming to WWF, Jennie worked as a teacher, author, consultant, and researcher. Her research areas have included rocky intertidal and salt marsh ecology, the genotoxic effects of environmental contaminants, and most recently, the ways in which marine embryos and larvae cope with environmental stressors. She has also worked as a community garden organizer, epidemiologist, and AIDS educator.
Tim Killeen
Senior Research Scientist
Center for Applied Biodiversity Science (CABS)
Tim Killeen, Ph. D., is a conservation biologist whose research interests have evolved over the course of his career, starting with the taxonomy and ecology of grasses, to later focus on dendrology, plant community ecology, and biodiversity patterns at local and regional scales. Efforts to map biodiversity led me to acquire expertise in remote sensing and geographical information systems, which eventually included an on-going effort to document the impact of habitat conversion and climate change on biodiversity. His collaboration with colleagues from North American and European universities has advanced the understanding of forest dynamics and paleoecology of Amazonian and Andean ecosystems. His conservation efforts in Bolivia have included advising on the design of the national protected area system, fostering community based ecotourism, and training students in botany, ecology and geography. He serves on the Board of the Chiquitano Forest Conservation Foundation and the Bolivian Institute for Forest Research, while acting as a Scientific Advisor at the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum. He is the recipient of the Biodiversity Leadership Award from The Bay and Paul Foundations. He is currently a Senior Research Scientist with the Center for Applied Biodiversity Research (CABS) at Conservation International.
John Matthews
Climate Adaptation Specialist - Freshwater
WWF
After growing up in a small town in east Texas, John Matthews attended the University of Chicago, graduating with a degree in cultural anthropology in 1990. For the next twelve years, he worked in the publishing industry for a variety of companies, primarily as an editor and writer. Having seen places he knew well as a child become rapidly degraded, John decided to leave publishing and spent two years taking undergraduate biology courses, then enrolling in the ecology, evolution, and behavior PhD program at the University of Texas in 2002. Graduating in 2007, his dissertation work focused on how aquatic insects and migratory species would be impacted by climate change. During graduate school, John consulted and collaborated with a variety of researchers, agencies, NGOs, and landowners on conservation and climate change issues. John's work with WWF focuses on developing and implementing strategies for global freshwater ecosystems to adapt and build resilience to the current period of climate shifts.
Steve McNulty
Ecologist
US Forest Service
Steve McNulty has served as the US Forest Service Southern Global Change Program Manager on the North Carolina State University campus in Raleigh North Carolina, since 1996. Prior to joining the Southern Global Change Program, he spent five years as a research ecologist at the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory. He has B.S., and M.S. degrees in Natural Resources from the University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of New Hampshire. Dr. McNulty is a landscape ecologist, with an area of focus being regional to continental scale environmental stress impacts on forest ecosystems. He served as a US Congressional Fellow in the 106th Congress, and he was the federal chair of the National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts on US Forests. Dr. McNulty is currently the US chair of the United States China Carbon Consortium, and he has authored or co-authored over 100 papers in the area of environmental stress impacts on forest ecosystems.
Terry Root
Senior Fellow-University Faculty at the Woods Institute for the Environment
Professor by Courtesy, Biological Sciences
Stanford University
President George H. Bush honored Dr. Root in 1990 with the prestigious Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. In 1992 she was 1 of only 10 people around the world to be selected as a Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment and was 1 of 20 people to be chosen to be an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow in 1999. She was the co-recipient with Stephen H. Schneider of the National Wildlife Federation's 2003 National Conservation Achievement Award and the Banksia International Award from the Australian Banksia Environmental Foundation in 2006.
Dr. Root received her Ph.D. in Biology from Princeton University in 1987. Before coming to Stanford, she was assistant and associate professor in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan from 1987 to 2001. She has served on the National Research Council Committee on Environmental Indicators. In 1989, she became an Elective Member of the American Ornithologists Union (AOU), the largest professional ornithology society in North American. She was elected to the Governing Council of the AOU in 1993 and she became a Fellow of AOU in 1995.
Dr. Root was a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Working Group II, Third and Fourth Assessment Reports, with responsibility for the impacts of climate change on wildlife. IPCC was co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.
Her awards and appointments further validate how Dr. Root's research is helping us to understand complex real-world problems, and her important outreach to decision makers and the general public.
Dr. Root's work has demonstrated that with only 0.8°C of warming over the last 30-45 years species around the globe are already changing dramatically: ranges moving poleward and up in elevation, events are happening earlier in the spring and later in the fall, and extinctions are beginning to occur. She and co-investigators have also used species to show that humans are indeed causing a large portion of the increase in local/regional temperatures. As the planet continues to warm, which will probably occur at an escalating rate, theory indicates that the world will likely face a mass extinction event-if the average global temperature reaches 4oC or higher than in 1990, greater than 40% of the known species could be marked for extinction. This would be caused by one species-us. Root's current and future work will be concentrating on adaptation measures for species and on establishing triage methods that will help significantly decrease the number of extinctions.
Diane Ross-Leech
Director
Environmental Policy
PG&E
Diane Ross-Leech, a landscape architect by training, is a director within PG&E's Environmental Policy department, where she has worked for over 20 years. She created the Environmental Stewardship Program that is responsible for developing multi-species habitat conservation plans, migratory bird protection plans, land conservation projects and other efforts that help PG&E ensure responsible stewardship of our resources. She serves on the management board of the San Francisco Bay Joint Venture, which protects and enhances wetlands and other baywide wildlife habitats, and on the board of directors of the San Francisco Bay Trail and Golden Gate Audubon.
Stephen Schneider
Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies,
Professor of Biological Sciences,
Senior Fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment
Stanford University.
Stephen H. Schneider is the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, Professor of Biological Sciences, and a Senior Fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. He served as an NCAR scientist from 1973-1996, where he co-founded the Climate Project. He focuses on climate change science, integrated assessment of ecological and economic impacts of human-induced climate change, and identifying viable climate policies and technological solutions. He has consulted for federal agencies and White House staff in six administrations. Involved with the IPCC since 1988, he is Coordinating Lead Author, WG II, Chapter 19, "Assessing Key Vulnerabilities and the Risk from Climate Change" for the Fourth Assessment Report and a core writer for the AR4 Synthesis Report. He along with four generations of IPCC authors received a collective Nobel Peace Prize for their joint efforts in 2007. Elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2002, Dr. Schneider received the American Association for the Advancement of Science/ Westinghouse Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology, a MacArthur Fellowship for integrating and interpreting the results of global climate research, and the Edward T. Law Roe Award of the Society of Conservation Biology as well as sharing the National Conservation Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation with his spouse-collaborator, Terry Root. Founder/ editor of Climatic Change, he has authored or co-authored over 500 books, scientific papers, proceedings, legislative testimonies, edited books and chapters, reviews and editorials. Dr. Schneider counsels policy makers, corporate executives, and non-profit stakeholders about using risk management strategies in climate-policy decision-making, given the uncertainties in future projections of global climate change and related impacts. He is actively engaged in improving public understanding of science and the environment through extensive media communication and public outreach.
Anne Schrag
Climate Research Program Officer
WWF
Anne Schrag joined the staff of the WWF-Northern Great Plains Program as the Climate Research Program Officer in 2007, where she is investigating the impacts of climate change on species of conservation concern and agricultural productivity in the ecoregion. She moved to Montana in 2002, shortly after completing undergraduate degrees in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Spanish Literature at the University of Kansas. After moving to Bozeman, she worked as an ecologist for the National Park Service Inventory and Monitoring Program for four years, setting up a long-term monitoring program in the parks of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. She completed her MS at Montana State University in 2006, where she studied the impacts of climate variability on upper treeline forests in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. She spent the months between finishing her thesis and beginning her position at WWF traveling to Argentina, Ecuador and the Galápagos Islands to beef up her long-neglected Spanish skills and work as an ecologist and group leader for teenagers working on humanitarian projects. Anne is originally from the flat-as-a-pancake state of Kansas and is therefore quite familiar with the ups and downs of life on the prairie. She enjoys all things involving the outdoors, including telemark skiing, climbing, road and mountain biking, backpacking, growing tomatoes in Montana and, especially, punishing trail runs with her mixed-breed dog, Kintla.
Anton Seimon
Assistant Director, Latin America and Caribbean Program
Wildlife Conservation Society
Anton joined WCS in 2007 as Assistant Director for the Latin America and Caribbean program after working as a Research Fellow at Columbia University's Earth Institute. At WCS he also works with Molly Cross to develop climate change initiatives within WCS global conservation programs. His research experience spans a broad range of topics including ecological response to climate change and deglaciation in tropical mountains, tornadoes and other meteorological hazards, and historical climate reconstruction from low-latitude ice cores.