Managing our Future: Environmental and Natural Hazards

Description

For further videos from this event, please click on the programme link on the right and then click on the speakers' names within the programme.

The seminar will be preceded by a public lecture on Thursday 11 March 2010 by Professor Frank Fischer (Politics and Global Affairs, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey).

Convenors:
Professor Keith Richards (Department of Geography, University of Cambridge)
Professor Susan Owens (Department of Geography, University of Cambridge)

Environmental risks involve both 'manufactured' risks associated with scientific and technological developments (e.g. climate change, nuclear energy, synthetic chemicals, GMOs, nanotechnology) and 'natural' hazards (e.g. volcanic eruptions and tsunamis); sometimes both. These risks are paradigmatic in the ‘risk society’– insidious, ubiquitous, and inseparable from at least a form of 'reflexive' modernity.

This seminar will debate how we might frame and respond to these risks; how institutional, political and social changes may challenge environmental risk governance; what the practical implications may be for risk regulation; what, for instance, it means to be precautionary in the case of complex risks whose effects are not yet manifest.

With contributions from:

Dr Jeremy Allouche (University of Sussex)
Professor Peter Atkins (University of Durham)
Professor David Demeritt (Department of Geography, King's College, London)
Professor Mike Hulme (University of East Anglia)
Dr David Nally (Department of Geography, University of Cambridge)
Professor Phillip Macnaghten (Department of Geography, University of Durham)
Professor David Polya (University of Manchester)
Professor Andrew Stirling (SPRU – Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Sussex)

 

Programme and Registration
The event will begin with a lecture on the evening of Thursday 11 March  followed by a day long seminar on Friday 12 March.  Please click on the link at the right hand side of the page to see a provisional programme. The lecture is free to attend and registration is not required. To book online for the seminar please click on the Online Registration link. The fee is £10 with a reduced fee of £5 for students.  The deadline for booking is Friday 5 March 2010.

 

This is the third in the series of Sawyer Seminars sponsored by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, Modelling Futures: Understanding Risk and Uncertainty 2009-2010.

For administrative enquiries please contact mm405@cam.ac.uk