Gonna get me some conference!

So you guys know that I am a "Environmental Policy" junkie and I love conferences (I am sick!). So guess what? I am going to a conference, here in Toronto, where some really cool people are going to speak:

Keynote Speaker

Scott Barrett

Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University

Scott Barrett is Professor of Environmental Economics and International Political Economy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, where he also directs the International Policy Program and the new Global Health and Foreign Policy Initiative. He is the author of Environment and Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-Making (published in paperback by Oxford University Press in 2005) and numerous research and policy papers on climate change. He has also advised a number of international bodies on the subject, including different agencies of the United Nations, the European Commission, the OECD and, most recently, the International Task Force on Global Public Goods. He was a lead author of the second assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and was previously a member of the Academic Panel of Environmental Economists to the UK’s Department of Environment.

Formerly on the faculty of the London Business School, he has also been a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. He received his PhD in economics from the London School of Economics and studied previously at the University of British Columbia. His latest book, Why Cooperate? The Incentive to Supply Global Public Goods, was published by Oxford University Press in September 2007.


Lunch Address

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Toronto

Thomas Homer-Dixon holds the George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at University College, University of Toronto.

He was born in Victoria, British Columbia and received his B.A. in political science from Carleton University in 1980 and his Ph.D. from MIT in international relations and defense and arms control policy in 1989. He then moved to the University of Toronto to lead several research projects studying the links between environmental stress and violence in developing countries. Recently, his research has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century and on how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change.

His books include The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (Knopf, Island Press, 2006), which won the 2006 National Business Book Award, The Ingenuity Gap (Knopf, 2000), which won the 2001 Governor General's Non-fiction Award, and Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton University Press, 1999), which won the Caldwell Prize of the American Political Science Association.