Special guest lecture by Asim Zia on the 19th of May

Please join us for a special guest lecture on the 19th of May from 12:00 to 13:00 at the Porter Building, Room 101

Highlands to Oceans (H2O): Anticipatory Governance of Hydroclimatic Regime Shifts in the Transboundary River Basins

Asim Zia

Abstract
Our world’s freshwater resources are rapidly deteriorating due to complex drivers, including urbanization, deforestation, ecosystem degradation, and climate change. Poor access to clean water intensifies transboundary conflicts that trigger famines, migrations, and water wars. In this talk, Dr. Zia will highlight science diplomacy and civic diplomacy approaches to develop novel Highlands to Oceans (H2O) Integrated Regime Shift Assessment Models (H2O-IRSAM) for facilitating anticipatory governance in transboundary basins spanning Lake Champlain (US and Canada), the Indus (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China), the Jordan (Israel, Palestine, Jordan) and the Amazon (Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Columbia, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela).  The H2O-IRSAM simulates global climate change (GCC) and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) induced hydro-climatic regime shifts; and their cascading impacts on water availability and socio-economic stability in transboundary river basins under alternate transboundary governance at basin scales, reactive versus anticipatory water policy regimes and their coevolutionary effects on the distribution of aquatic ecosystem services for both highland and lowland farmers, energy producers, households and environmental flows. Implications of such science and public diplomacy efforts for enabling anticipatory governance of regime shifts to prevent water conflicts, and build resilience in transboundary river basins will be discussed
 

Bio

Asim Zia's research, teaching and outreach activities focus on advancing the sustainability and resilience of integrated socio-environmental systems. He has led NSF, USDA and McArthur foundation funded Team Science projects aimed at developing computational models of Social Ecological Systems. Foresight generated from these computational models is used widely to design anticipatory policies, configure governance systems and implement adaptive management. Asim Zia is serving as a Professor of Public Policy and Computer Science at the University of Vermont (UVM). He is Director of the Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security (IEDS); and recently appointed as a Fulbright Global Scholar (2021-2023) to lead a project on “Securing Clean Water in Transboundary Indus, Jordan and Amazon Basins through Science and Environmental Diplomacy