Climate Policy Expert to Speak in Lincoln

LINCOLN, Nebr. -- Dr. Rosina Bierbaum, who was a science advisor to Al Gore when he was Vice-President, will speak on “Ecological Implications of Climate Change,” February 13 at 3:30 p.m. Her talk will be free and open to the public, in Hardin Hall at 33rd and Holdrege streets on the University of Nebraska’s East Campus.

The presentation will be part of the Spring Lecture Series organized by the School of Natural Resources and the Water Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. All of the presentations will be available on DVD. Dr. Don Wilhite, Director of the School, noted that Bierbaum has been a leader in climate change science and policy for more than a decade.

"She is an ecologist by training, so she brings a broad, interdisciplinary framework to this complex environmental issue,” Wilhite said. “Dr. Bierbaum’s perspective is especially relevant to Nebraska since we are located in the fragile Great Plains ecosystem, which is particularly vulnerable to even minor shifts in climate.”

Besides reducing greenhouse gas emissions, “We must begin to adapt to climate change because it’s well underway,” Bierbaum said in a 2007 videotaped introduction to Confronting Climate Change: A Scientific Expert Panel Report. “The most vulnerable [people] in the world with the least resources to cope with climate change will be the most affected. But so will the poor in many of the developed countries in the world.”
The panel recommended an array of steps, from not building anything within a meter of sea level, to developing broad-scale strategies to cope with shifting agricultural zones.

Bierbaum has been Dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan since October 2001. Previously, Dr. Bierbaum led environmental science policy departments in both the legislative and executive branches of government, culminating as Director of the Environment Division of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, a Senate-confirmed position.

She led four U.S. delegations to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Bierbaum has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Among other awards, she has received the Waldo E. Smith Medal, American Geophysical Union, in recognition of extraordinary service to geophysics, and the Climate Protection Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

She currently serves on the boards of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research; the National Research Council’s Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate; the Federation of American Scientists; the Environmental and Energy Study Institute; the Energy Foundation; and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. She is also a member of the Design Committee for The Heinz Center’s The State of the Nation’s Ecosystems project; the Executive Committee for the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement; and the Science Advisory Committee for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Dr. Bierbaum received her B.S. in Biology and B.A. in English from Boston College, and earned her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

• Source: Dr. Donald A. Wilhite, Director, School of Natural Resources, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, dwilhite1@unl.edu, 402-472-4720.
• Writer: Kelly Helm Smith, ksmith2@unl.edu, 402-472-3373.