Global and Climate Change

Presented by

Robert Johnston

Director of the George Perkins Marsh Institute

Robert Johnston is professor of economics and chair of Clark University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), and also serves as editor of the Resource and Energy Economics journal. Johnston is a recognized international expert in environmental valuation — quantifying the benefits and costs of environmental change and its impacts on human behavior. Among other current roles, he is on the Steering Committee of the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program and Senior Advisory Board of the Connecticut Sea Grant Program. He is past chair of the Ecosystem Science and Management Working Group of the NOAA Science Advisory Board and a former member of the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board, along with many other federal advisory and review panels. His publications include multiple books and more than 110 journal articles on topics such as environmental valuation and climate adaptation.

Edward Carr

Professor and Director, International Development, Community, and Environment Department

Ed Carr, along with leading IDCE, directs the Humanitarian Response and Development Lab, a research unit at Clark addressing real-world challenges at the intersection of global development and climate change. Beyond Clark, Carr is the climate change adaptation adviser for the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel of the Global Environment Facility. Previously, he was the first climate change coordinator for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance, and an adaptation adviser for the World Bank. He has co-authored several global environmental assessments, including the IPCC’s recent Sixth Assessment Report and the ongoing IPBES Transformative Change Assessment.

Rinku Roy Chowdhury

Associate Professor of Geography

Rinku Roy Chowdhury’s research examines environmental change across diverse locations, including tropical forest-agricultural mosaics (Mexico), urban land use and ecology (multiple U.S. cities), hydrology and water policy in the Florida Everglades, and coastal mangrove and urban vulnerability to climate change (Americas, South Asia). She integrates interdisciplinary and field-based approaches to understand smallholder land and agrobiodiversity management, how institutional structures and local agencies interact to shape landscapes, and the evolution of adaptive strategies in the face of climate and political-economic change. She is active in the U.S. Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network, co-chaired the Global Land Programme of Future Earth, and was a coordinating lead author in the Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Global Assessment launched at UNESCO–Paris in 2019.

Christopher A. Williams

Professor of Geography
Director of Environmental Sciences

Christopher Williams is a professor of earth system science specializing in terrestrial ecosystems, global ecology, and land surface hydrology. With extensive grant support, particularly from NASA and various NGOs, his Biogeosciences Research Group documents how Earth’s biosphere responds to, and feeds back on, global climate change. His team’s leading science on the climate impacts of forest change is guiding state offices of environment, conservation, and climate in New England and New York as well as conservation and land trust organizations (e.g., The Nature Conservancy, Open Space Institute, and Trust for Public Lands) with decision support for carbon and climate mitigation in natural and working lands.  Williams is chair of the science leadership group of the North American Carbon Program, science co-investigator of the Harvard Forest National Science Foundation Long Term Ecological Research program, and science team member of NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System.