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A rapidly changing Arctic is reshaping everything. Polar bears navigate shrinking expanses of sea ice, thawing permafrost threatens coastal villages, destabilizes infrastructure, and exhales methane, and warming temperatures push more species northward into a greener arctic. These transformations are profound, and their impacts can extend far beyond the region’s ecologies that depend on them.
What do these changes mean for wildlife, humans, and the climate? How is all of this going to play out in different regions and ecosystems around the world? Does understanding these changes and seeing them with your own eyes change the way you see everything else?
Join Biodiversity for a Livable Climate for a conversation that convenes story and science, writer and researcher to help shape our understanding of what this means for the Arctic, our climate and the webs of life that depend on both. Jon Waterman, writer for both Patagonia and NatGeo, and author of Into the Thaw, will be joined by Dr. Flavio Lehner, Chief Climate Scientist at Polar Bears International—one a storyteller of the Arctic’s systems, the other a researcher of them.
Jon Waterman found his calling as a writer while shooting photographs on expeditions more than four decades ago. He has shot and written television films, including “The Logan Challenge,” “Surviving Denali,” “Odyssey Among the Inuit,” “ANWR Trek,” and “Chasing Water.” Jon is known for his Northern explorations, detailed in many of his books and countless journals since 1978. Beginning in 2007, the rivers of the Southwest began to call, with an extended journey and National Geographic Society research projects. His latest book, Into The Thaw, recounts how his return to one particular place in the Arctic after a more than 30 year absence left him shocked by its change, but also renewed with drive and hope.
Dr. Flavio Lehner is Polar Bears International’s Chief Climate Scientist. He is also an Assistant Professor in Earth and Atmospheric Science at Cornell University. He obtained a PhD in Climate Science from the University of Bern in Switzerland in 2013. After a brief engagement as Science Officer in the Technical Support Unit for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, he joined the Climate and Global Dynamics Lab at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in 2014. After a year as a Senior Scientist at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, Flavio joined Cornell University as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2020. His research group studies climate variability and change with a focus on physical processes that affect humans and ecosystems, from heatwaves and droughts to sea ice trends and precipitation extremes.
This is the latest installment in our Life Saves the Planet lecture series, and it will be recorded by our partners at GBH Forum Network. Register now!