Dr. Susanne Moser is Director and Principal Researcher of Susanne Moser Research & Consulting, based in Hadley, MA, a Research Faculty in the Environmental Studies Department of Antioch University New England and an Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at UMass-Amherst.
Dr. Moser is a geographer by training (Ph.D. 1997, Clark University). Previously she served as a Social Science Research Fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, a Research Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, served as staff scientist for climate change for the Union of Concerned Scientists, and has worked for the Heinz Center in Washington, DC.
Susanne Moser is co-editor with Max Boykoff (University of Colorado-Boulder) of a prize-winning edited volume on Successful Adaptation (Routledge, 2013), and with Lisa Dilling (University of Colorado-Boulder) of a groundbreaking anthology on climate change communication, called Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change, published in 2006 by Cambridge University Press. She contributed to the Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports of Working Group 2 of the IPCC, served as Review Editor for the IPCC Special Report on “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation” and participated in the Scientific Steering Committee for the Special Report on the “Impacts of 1.5°C and Associated Emissions Pathways.” She also was a member of the federal advisory committee on the Third US National Climate Assessment, co-lead that committee’s Engagement and Communication working group, and served as one of the Convening Lead Authors on the assessment’s coastal chapter. Over the past ten years she contributed repeatedly to California’s state-focused climate assessments.
She is a prolific writer, an inspiring speaker and has served on scientific advisory boards for Future Earth, the International Science Council (formerly, International Social Science Council), the International Human Dimensions Program, US National Research Council, and numerous other organizations. Susi is a fellow of the Aldo Leopold Leadership, Kavli Frontiers of Science, Donella Meadows Leadership, Google Science Communication, and Walton Sustainability Solutions Programs.
Topic:
Ecology for All…If We Want It: Three Transformational Imperatives
What would it mean to use the ESA Annual Meeting – and our day-to-day work back home – to make ecology relevant and useful to people whose decisions would benefit from ecological science? How would that change how we work and what we work on, who we work with and how we communicate?
At a time, when the pressures on Earth’s biosphere are near breaking points (and nowhere near diminishing), when public policy has set biodiversity and habitat protection targets while climate change undermines practically everything we work so hard to achieve, when species and ecosystem services are being lost ever-more rapidly and even our own spirits falter at times in the face of the mounting losses of all we love – something has got to give.
It is time to not just incrementally adjust our work, but slow down long enough to reckon with the transformations that need to happen. Yes, transformations “out there”, by others, but also in our own way of doing what we do, in ourselves. This opening plenary will lay out three imperatives for profound change in our work as academic and applied scientists that are required to meet the growing multi-faceted crises of the day. The stakes could hardly be higher. The benefits – immeasurable.