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Climate Risk Management

Linking Research and the Red Cross

Pablo Suarez

Associate Director for Research and Innovation at the

Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

3:00 pm - 4:30 pm

Redfield Auditorium, WHOI

Woods Hole, MA

SERIOUS FUN: Linking Woods Hole and the Red Cross for climate risk management through games.

How can we accelerate the integration of science into humanitarian work for risk management?   The Red Cross / Red Crescent Climate Centre has been working with academic partners through an innovative approach: participatory games that simulate complex system dynamics, allowing players to inhabit the tradeoffs, thresholds, feedbacks and delays involved in real-world decisions among people and organizations confronting serious challenges involving coastal areas - from subsistence fishing villages to Red Cross disaster managers to government planners, and from incoming tropical cyclones to long-term sea level rise. In this intensely interactive session we will experience the richness of serious yet fun ways to collect, process and share information about hazards, vulnerabilities and capacities.

Biography

Dr. Pablo Suarez’s research focuses on the use of information for reducing vulnerability. He is associate director of programs for the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre, and an advisor for Oxfam America’s Private Sector Team. He has consulted for the United Nations Environment Programe, the World Bank, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany and other international organizations, working in more than 30 countries.

Dr. Suarez is a visiting scholar at Boston University and a guest scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). He has worked and published on a diverse range of issues including transportation modeling, food security implications of changing rainfall patterns, microinsurance instruments for subsistence farmers, and the impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic on disaster management organizations. His current work addresses adaptation to climate change, institutional innovation and integration, and the use of video and other communication tools for awareness, advocacy and capacity building.