About The Presentation: "Biodiversity, Climate Change, and The Political Process"

Humans share the planet with another ten million species. This diversity of living beings is essential to our survival, as they provide key services to humans and the other organisms on Earth—including nutrient, gas, and water-cycling, food, medicine, energy, and shelter. Acknowledging their relevance is especially pressing given how anthropogenic climate and habitat change are impacting the structure and function of natural environments worldwide. The health of our planet, human well-being, and global political stability are all expected to be at risk if the Earth’s environments continue to degrade. This presentation reviews where we stand in regard to this negative footprint, and discusses how biodiversity and the ecological processes that maintain life on Earth have been reacting to this rapid change. To revert this depressing landscape, policy making on environmental sustainability will profit from a deeper understanding of the sciences and the analysis of data on climate change, biodiversity, habitat loss and other contributing factors to the challenges of extinction, food security and extreme weather changes. On the flip side, the biological and environmental sciences will benefit from a greater understanding of policy making, international law, the role of the United Nations, NGOs and the private sector as policies are put into place that impact biodiversity and environmental sustainability. In this talk, I describe how some of us at CCNY have been working across departments and Divisions to bring Science, Policy, and Communication more closely aligned toward this end - through both our research and our teaching. The path to a greener, healthier, and more environmentally just world is transdisciplinary. We need more of these bridges.

About Dr. Ana Carnaval

Ana Carnaval was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she obtained her undergraduate Biology degree and a Master’s degree in Zoology from Museu Nacional. She has a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology from The University of Chicago, working at The Field Museum. Before coming to CUNY, Ana was an NSF postdoctoral fellow in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley.

At CCNY, Ana and her students study the awe-inspiring biological diversity of our planet. Specifically, the Carnaval lab studies spatial patterns of biodiversity and their underlying evolutionary and ecological processes, with the explicit aim of improving biodiversity prediction and conservation. Lab projects focus on biogeography, integrative uses of comparative phylogeography, GIS-based distribution models, current environmental data and paleoclimatic simulations, physiology, and genomics – with a special focus in tropical forests (though recently expanding into North American paw-paws and sugar maples).

The Carnaval Lab believes that documenting, understanding, and protecting global biodiversity is only possible if jointly led by scientists, stakeholders, and community members of all backgrounds, cultures, races, languages, and genders. As such, the lab values and bases its work on mutual respect and support, and believes that the best biodiversity science builds from strong, rich, cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary and inter-racial collaborations - especially in megadiverse tropical countries.