The Faculty of Sociology invite You to a webinar on "Climate change, epidemic, was as a crisis and risk" given by prof. Arjen Boin from Leiden University and prof. Zbigniew Kundzewicz from Poznan University of Life Science.
The event will take place on January 19, from 5 pm to 6:30 pm. The pre-registration is required!
The Webinar will be conducted by prof. Piotr Matczak from Adam Mickiewicz University.
Abstract:
The concept of crisis indicates tension, danger, and a breakthrough that takes place over a limited period of time. Consequently, dealing with a crisis requires not only finding remedies but also applying them in a situation of temporal tension. With regard to contemporary environmental threats, the IPCC reports have defined the use of the concept of risk (as a combination/product of the three parameters: hazard, exposure, vulnerability) to describe threats. Meanwhile, the concept of crisis, and especially the temporal aspect of the crisis, allows one to analyze the different paces of social and natural processes. In this context, one can indicate micro-scale crises, e.g. flash floods, where a crisis (catastrophe) occurs when the hydrological process is faster than the reaction of the social system, or - on a macro scale, e.g. a climate crisis, epidemics, or war, where the processes take place in the perspective of decades or centuries. This raises the question of to what extent the concepts of risk and crisis are competitive or complementary and to which extent are instrumental in combining the natural, social, and human sciences perspectives to better understand the world.
The webinar is a part of a series of seminars entitled „Resilience in the context of permanent crisis”
Arjen Boin is a Professor of Public Institutions and Governance at the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University. He has published widely on topics of crisis and disaster management, leadership, institutional design and organizational issues. His most recent books include Guardians of Public Value, Understanding the Creeping Crisis and Governing the Pandemic (all three were published in 2021 by Palgrave and can be downloaded for free). His book Managing Hurricane Katrina (Louisiana State University Press, 2019) investigates the lessons that should be learned from this mega-disaster. His other books include The Politics of Crisis Management (Cambridge University Press, winner of APSA’s Herbert A. Simon book award), Governing after Crisis (Cambridge UP, 2008), Crisis Management: A Three Volume Set of Essential Readings (Sage, 2008), Designing Resilience (Pittsburgh UP, 2010), MegaCrises (Charles C Thomas, 2012) and The EU as Crisis Manager: Patterns and Prospects (Cambridge UP, 2013). Arjen is also a managing partner at Crisisplan BV and a founding member of the European Societal Security Research Group.
Zbigniew W. Kundzewicz, a Corresponding Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a Member of Academia Europaea is a Professor of Earth Sciences (since 1993) at Poznan University of Life Sciences. He has been a Coordinating Lead Author of Chapter 13 (Europe) in IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) WG2 TAR (Climate Change - Impacts, Adaptation, Vulnerabilities); Chapter 3 (Freshwater resources and their management) in IPCC WG2 AR4; IPCC Technical Paper on Climate Change and Water; and Chapter 4 of the IPCC Special Report on Extremes; hence part of the inner circle of the IPCC (2007 Nobel Peace Prize laureate). He has been a Member of the Advisory Board on the Environment (including Climate Change) of the European Union Seventh Framework Programme, Editor-in-Chief of an international scientific bi-monthly „Hydrological Sciences Journal” and a member of editorial boards of several scientific journals. He has been a recipient of a Dooge Medal of the IAHS/UNESCO/WMO International Hydrology Prize (2017) and a Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water – The Surface Water Prize (2020). He has published nearly 600 scientific publications.
Piotr Matczak is a professor at the Faculty of Sociology, Adam Mickiewicz University. He works on natural and man-made risks, crisis management, environmental policy from the perspective of ecosystem services, and sustainable development of urban and rural communities. He participated in several research programs, Polish and international ones, on those issues. He was Secretary of the Committee for Risk Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a member of the Board of Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty Research Network of the European Sociological Association. He is the editor of the journals: "Society and Natural Resources", "Water" and "Geographies". He co-edited a special issue of the Water magazine entitled "Flood Risk Governance for More Resilience". He published, inter alia, in: "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences", "Environmental Science & Policy", "Weather, Climate and Society", "Ecosystem Services", "Ecology and Society", "Earth's Future", "Global Environmental Change", "WIREs Water".
