Research by Bard CEP Faculty Robyn Smyth and Monique Segarra and Alum Uroosa Fatima MS ’18 Is Focus of Environmental Development Special Issue

Bard Center for Environmental Policy faculty Dr. Robyn Smyth and Dr. Monique Segarra, along with Bard College alumna Uroosa Fatima MS ’18, are the lead authors of an article published in a special issue of Environmental Development focusing on interdisciplinary research on global change across the Americas, funded by the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research. The article, “Engaging stakeholders across a socio-environmentally diverse network of water research sites in North and South America,” describes the approaches used and challenges faced by research teams aiming to advance integrated and inclusive understanding of climate risks to water resources at a continental scale. 

 This research is part of the Sensing the Americas’ Freshwater Ecosystem Risk (SAFER) project and supported by a supplemental grant awarded by the National Science Foundation’s Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) to Dr. Tom Harmon of the University of California Merced. “It's important to keep changing your perspective on hard, socio-environmental problems,” says Dr. Harmon. “When we started the SAFER project, we placed a lot of emphasis on creating sensing systems to monitor freshwater systems and help understand the risk of losing these ecosystems to pollution. Having good data is important, but equally if not more important is the stakeholders’ perception about the risk and how to manage it.”

Post Date: 04-28-2021