Seminar: “Climate Change, Sea Level Rise, and Migration in Bangladesh”

The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future invites you to attend its upcoming seminar, “Climate Change, Sea Level Rise, and Migration in Bangladesh,” at the Pardee Center, 67 Bay State Road, on Wednesday, February 14 from 12:00 – 1:30 pm (lunch will be available beginning at 11:30 am).

Faculty Research Fellow Prof. Bruce Anderson (BU Department of Earth & Environment) will set the stage with an overview of the physical climate change impacts in Bangladesh. Sabbatical Scholar Prof. Pallab Mozumder (Florida International University) will discuss the policy options for responding to the threat of climate change in the country’s coastal regions. Finally, 2017 Graduate Summer Fellow Calynn Dowler (PhD candidate, BU Department of Anthropology) will talk about on-the-ground implications and how local people are coping with the challenges of natural disasters, resource scarcity, and migration.

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Speakers:

Bruce Anderson is a Professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University and a Faculty Research Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.

In addition, Prof. Anderson actively works with the public sector on issues related to climate variability, including serving as a Research Consultant for the Union of Concerned Scientist’s Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment (NECIA) project, an expert advisor for the Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment for Cambridge, MA, and a contributing author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report. He was one of the inaugural Grantham Institute for Climate Change Visiting Fellows at Imperial College for Science, Technology and Medicine and has also been a Royal Society Visiting Scientist, National Research Council Fellow and a NOAA Visiting Scientist Fellow. Prof. Anderson has more than 50 peer-reviewed articles published or in press and has been an invited speaker at both national and international universities, conferences, and workshops. Prof. Anderson is also the lead author (with Prof. Alan Strahler, BU) of an introductory undergraduate textbook on Weather and Climate, published jointly by John Wiley & Sons and the National Geographic Society (2008).

Pallab Mozumder is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Earth & Environment with joint appointment in the Dept. of Economics at Florida International University (FIU), Miami, Florida, and a Sabbatical Scholar at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. He coordinates the Social Science Research Lab at the International Hurricane Research Center (IHRC) at FIU. He is an environmental economist with expertise in socio-economic aspects of natural hazards. His research on hurricane risk mitigation and evacuation behavior has been funded by federal and state agencies such as the National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Florida Department of Community Affairs and Florida Sea Grant. He received his PhD in Environmental and Natural Resources Economics from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Before joining at FIU, he spent two years as a Post Doctoral Fellow at The Environmental Institute (TEI), University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. In 2017-18, he is a Sabbatical Scholar at the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at the Boston University.

Calynn Dowler is a PhD student in the department of anthropology at Boston University and a 2017 Graduate Summer Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. Her dissertation is an ethnographic examination of migration, environment, and identity in the low-lying deltaic islands known as the Sundarbans, which span the border of present-day West Bengal, India and Bangladesh. As the Sundarbans is physically transformed by processes linked to climate change, such as salinization and land erosion, her project focuses on shifting social, political, and cultural geographies. Through close attention to past and present displacement, narrative, ritual, and practical engagements with the natural world, she explores the ways in which identities (e.g., “Hindu,” “Muslim,” “refugee”) are constructed in relation to space/place, how relationships across difference are negotiated, and how environmental changes are experienced and understood.

Calynn holds a BA in Political Science and German from Gettysburg College. She completed her MA in Migration Studies at the University of Sussex as a Fulbright scholar in 2011-12. She conducted research on migration and environment policies in the Sundarbans as a graduate student fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer Range Future in summer 2017. She will continue her research in the Indian Sundarbans as a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellow in 2018-19.