Bicentennial Mini-Science: Charting a Course to Global Sustainability in the 21st Century

With Andrew Gonzalez, Professor, Dept. of Biology, McGill University

The erosion of biological diversity and global climate change are the two great environmental crises of our time. They threaten the sustainability of human society in the coming century. They are affecting the food we eat, the diseases we face, our vulnerability to fire and flood, and they jointly challenge our ability to adapt and persist far into the future. In this talk, Prof. Gonzalez will present our current understanding of these threats, but will also discuss the opportunities we have to steer a course to a sustainable human society without irreversibly degrading the Earth's biosphere.

Andrew Gonzalez is Professor, Liber Ero Chair in Biodiversity Conservation, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in the Department of Biology, McGill University. He is a past Killam Research Fellow and a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Biodiversity Science. He has published 154 papers, including papers in Nature and Science. He is an ISI highly cited researcher (2019 and 2020) a distinction given to 6200 of the world's researchers, across 21 research fields and multiple fields. Peer citations place him in the top 0.02% most highly cited scientists in the field of Environment/Ecology. His major research interests include: 1) the causes of biodiversity change and its impact on society, 2) rapid evolution and the maintenance of biodiversity in human modified environments, and 3) the application of network science to the conservation of biodiversity at large scales. He is the founding Director of the Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science. He is the co-Chair of the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Networks (GEO BON) an international network that contributes to effective management policies for the world’s biodiversity and ecosystem services. He was a member of the Executive Council of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution, and member of the Expert Panel on Biodiversity Science for the Council of Canadian Academies in 2010. In 2017, he spoke at TEDx and the World Economic Forum in Davos. He is co-founder of the environmental consultancy and spin-off company eco2urb.

Watch the recording Discover the Mini-Science series