Hi IRES Sister Departments and Faculties,

Please circulate the event email below within your unit. Due to the weather, our seminar will only be via Zoom.

Many thanks!

Bonnie

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Bonnie Leung

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Hi everyone,

Tomorrow’s IRES Seminar will be via Zoom only.  Note: The second speaker, Alberto Campos, had to cancel.  His seminar will be re-scheduled for a future time.

January 18, 2024: IRES Student Seminar with Kushank Bajaj

Transboundary climate risks of Canada’s fruit and vegetable supply

Time: 12:30pm to 1:00pm

Location: Zoom only due to weather.

Click here to register for Zoom link.

Talk summary:

Fruits and vegetables are an integral part of a healthy diet. However, ensuring Canadians have sufficient and affordable access to fresh produce can be challenging, particularly in an increasingly shock-prone world. Part of the challenge arises from Canada’s heavy dependence on international trade for its fruit and vegetable supply—a system vulnerable to cascading disruptions. To better understand these vulnerabilities, in this study I map the spatially-explicit supply chains of 18 fruits and 16 vegetables for Canadian provinces from 2010 to 2022, accounting for interprovincial flows. I employ a mass-balance approach, drawing on customs-based trade, production, and demand data. Further, by integrating these data with future extreme weather indices derived from downscaled and bias-corrected ensemble climate models, I discern Canada’s consumption-based and cross-border exposure to weather extremes in a warmer world. During this seminar, I will present the methods employed to develop fruit and vegetable flows, describe the supply chains by province and produce, and outline future weather extreme exposures in these supply chains.

 

  Kushank Bajaj, IRES PhD Candidate

 

Bio:

Kushank Bajaj is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability, a Doctoral Fellow with the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, and a Climate Policy Researcher with Generation Squeeze. At UBC, he is supervised by Prof. Navin Ramankutty. Kushank is an interdisciplinary researcher studying sustainable food systems and systemic climate risks. He utilizes data science and data visualization skills combined with a policy-relevant focus. Kushank’s research experience, working in the not-for-profit and government sectors, has trained him to work with diverse datasets and at multiple scales from global to hyper-local.

 

See you tomorrow on Zoom!

 

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Bonnie Leung

RES Program Support (she/her/hers)

Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES)

University of British Columbia | Vancouver Campus | Musqueam Traditional Territory

Aquatic Ecosystems Research Laboratory (AERL Building)

Room 429 – 2202 Main Mall | Vancouver, BC | V6T 1Z4 | Canada

 

Email: bonnie.leung@ubc.ca

Tel: 604-822-9249