This Workshop was held in autumn of 2016 in Wells, Maine, an area of the country known for its environmental beauty.
The premise of the Workshop was that long before the Paris Agreement, scientists, engineers, business men and women, public officials, academicians and non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) throughout the US and the world were hard at work in trying to solve the myriad of problems associated with anthropogenic climate change. The legislative force of the Montreal Protocol is now in support of the Agreement’s key emission reduction goals. It was time for the seasoned leaders who implemented the Protocol, the world’s most successful international treaty for the protection of the atmosphere, to share their knowledge and wisdom with the next generation of policy makers, technical professionals, and graduate/undergraduate educators before that expertise was lost. The purpose of bringing these
various communities of practice together was to:
- Leverage the many successes to date to inspire future innovations through ‘lessons learned’;
- Ensure that new atmospheric environmental regulations are timely communicated and economically executed; and
- Identify business opportunities for related sustainable development.
Based on contributors’ expertise and the multidisciplinary nature of climate change, Workshop topics ranged from an update on the outbreak of the Zika virus to design modifications of drainage systems in response to increases in extreme weather events. Material was consequently organized into four major themes:
- Environmental, health and societal impacts;
- Case studies in industry and infrastructure;
- Advances in education; and
- Sustainability and strategic planning.
This last category, while seemingly esoteric in nature, provided Workshop participants with the opportunity to apply critical thinking methodologies to his or her own situational awareness of climate change.
Workshop results are to be published by Cambridge Scholars under the title, “Demystifying Climate Risk: A Practitioner’s Guide”.
