Pardee Center Postdocs Participate in AAG Annual Meeting
Laurence L. Delina and John Patrick Connors, two postdoctoral associates at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, recently attended the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), held in San Francisco from March 29 to April 2.
Delina presented a paper titled “Producing energy futures in the global south: towards a structured decision-making for energy transitions.” His talk focused on how the new climate-development architecture was founded by two major multilateral documents produced in 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement. He discussed how this new architecture opens up contested areas such as technology choice, and those concerning the transition’s temporal and spatial imperatives. Delina put forward an agenda for negotiating these contestations, mentioning, among others, considerations related to the plurality of relevant actors in the decision-making process, and aspects pertaining to morality, ethics, behaviors, cultures, institutions, finance, gender, poverty, freedoms, and development.
Connors organized — and presented a paper in — a session on Social Dimensions of Agroecology. His paper, titled “Disentangling Diversity: Agrobiodiversity, Livelihoods, and Food Security in the Kilombero Valley, Tanzania,” examines the relationship between food security and various livelihood activities in the Kilombero Valley, in order to address the competing ideas surrounding development strategies focused on agricultural specialization and agrobiodiversity. Drawing from extensive fieldwork including 280 household survey responses and focus group discussions, the paper considers whether crop and livelihood diversification explains differences in food security and dietary diversity.
He also organized a series of sessions, including two sets of paper presentations and a panel discussion, on Sustainable Urban Development and Geodesign. The first session explored advances in Geodesign, a forward-thinking, interdisciplinary, iterative framework that pairs planning, design, and environmental systems with geospatial technologies. The session examined recent contributions to the advancement of Geodesign from cities, universities, and technology in efforts to assess design scenarios, analyze large data sets, and provide the training necessary to address complex societal challenges among urban systems in the 21st century. The panel discussion featured six scholars with various backgrounds examining the challenges and opportunities for applying geospatial technologies to the planning and design of sustainable cities. In particular, the panel focused on the notion of sustainable urban forms to help reduce extreme temperatures, minimize the effects of urban expansion, reduce energy needs, protect water resources, and promote environmental justice.
The 2016 American Association of Geographers’ Annual Meeting featured over 6,600 presentations, posters, and workshops by geographers, GIS specialists, environmental scientists, and other researchers. Click here for the full program of events.