A Sampling of our featured speakers….

Jeffrey Simpson is the most decorated journalist in Canada. An Officer of the Order of Canada, he also received seven honorary doctorates and numerous national writing awards, including the Governor-General’s Prize and the Donner Prize for the best book on public policy, the National Newspaper Award (twice) and the National Magazine Award. He also won the Hyman Soloman Award for public policy journalism, the Arthur Kroeger Award for contributions to public policy, and the Charles Lynch prize for coverage of national politics.

For 32 years, Simpson’s national affairs column in The Globe and Mail was essential reading for decision-makers and informed Canadians across the country. In that column, and in hundreds of public speeches and lectures, he ranged over an enormous number of domestic and international issues, from politics to health-care, from climate-change to economic and fiscal policy, to Canadian-American relations and the Middle East. In addition to making presentations at conferences here and abroad, he moderated many conferences. He retired from column-writing at The Globe and Mail in mid-2016, but continues to lecture and speak on many of the leading issues of the day.

He has written eight books, including Hot Air: Meeting Canada’s Climate Change Challege, numerous magazine articles, appeared regularly on television in English and French, and was a guest lecturer at such universities as Oxford, Edinburgh, Harvard, Princeton, Brigham Young, California and more than a dozen universities in Canada. He has been a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California; a Skelton-Clark Fellow and Brockington Visitor at Queen’s university; a distinguished visitor at the University of Alberta; and a member of the Georgetown University Leadership Seminar.

He has been a member of the board of trustees of Queen’s University, the board of overseers of Green, College, University of British Columbia; the advisory councils of the Robarts Medical Research Institute and the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western university; and the editorial board of the Queen’s Quarterly. He was vice-chairman of the City of Ottawa Library Board and was awarded the William Watkinson Award for outstanding contributions to the Canadian library community.

Simpson has taught as an adjunct professor at the Queen’s University Institute of Policy Studies and the University of Ottawa Law School. He is senior fellow at the University of Ottawa

Edward A. (Ted) Parson is Dan and Rae Emmett Professor of Environmental Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the University of California, Los Angeles.  Parson studies international environmental law and policy, the role of science and technology in policy-making, and the political economy of regulation.  His articles have appeared in Science, Nature, Climatic Change, Issues in Science and Technology, the Journal of Economic Literature, and the Annual Review of Energy and the Environment.  His most recent books are A Subtle Balance: Evidence, Expertise, and Democracy in Public Policy  and Governance, 1970-2010 (McGill-Queens University Press, 2015), The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change (with Andrew Dessler) (2nd ed. Cambridge, 2010), and Protecting the Ozone Layer: Science and Strategy (Oxford, 2003), which won the 2004 Sprout Award of the International Studies Association and is widely recognized as the authoritative account of the development of international cooperation to protect the ozone layer.

Parson has led and served on multiple advisory committees, for the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and other national and international bodies.  He was formerly Joseph L. Sax Collegiate Professor of Law, Professor of Natural Resources and Environment, and Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and spent twelve years on the faculty of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.  In addition to his academic positions, Parson has worked and consulted for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress, the Privy Council Office of the Government of Canada, the U.N. Environment Program, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).  He holds degrees in physics from the University of Toronto and in management science from the University of British Columbia, and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard.  In former lives, he was a professional classical musician and an organizer of grass-roots environmental groups.

Adrian has served as CEO at Carbon Engineering since 2013, where he has led the team that designed, built and tested the world’s first scalable atmospheric CO2 capture pilot plant. Adrian previously served at Plug Power as Chief Technology Officer, successfully leading its industrial fuel cell product development and commercialization efforts. Adrian also spent a year in France supporting the creation of a JV between Plug Power and Air Liquide to bring the product line to Europe.  Adrian received a Master’s Degree from the University of Victoria and is a registered P.Eng in the Province of British Columbia.

Werner Kurz. Dr. Werner Kurz is a Senior Research Scientist at the Canadian Forest Service (Natural Resources Canada) in Victoria, BC. He leads the development of Canada’s National Forest Carbon Monitoring, Accounting and Reporting System, the Carbon Budget Model of the Canadian Forest Sector (CBM-CFS), and the Forest Carbon Management Project of the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions. His research focuses on carbon dynamics in forests and harvested wood products, as affected by natural and human disturbances as well as climate change.  He investigates the opportunities of the forest sector to contribute to climate change mitigation. Dr. Kurz co-authored six reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He serves as adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia and at Simon Fraser University. He obtained an honorary doctorate from the Swedish Land Universities (SLU).

Chris applies principles of Industrial Ecology to challenges of developing sustainable cities and global infrastructure systems.  Much of his work has involved the study of urban metabolism – the energy and material flows through cities – which underlies greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts of cites. He also draws upon qualifications in Civil Engineering, Economics and Business to advise on policies and planning for sustainable infrastructure. Clients have included the governments of Canada, China, Saudi Arabia; UAE, and the UK, as well as the World Bank, Ontario Ministry of Finance, and others.  In 2011/12, he was seconded to the OECD in Paris, to work on Cities, Green Growth and Policies for Encouraging Investment in Low Carbon Infrastructure and was a visiting professor at Oxford University and ETH Zürich. Currently he serves as President of the International Society for Industrial Ecology, is a Senior Fellow at the Global Cities Institute  and author of The Evolution of Great World Cities: Urban Wealth and Economic Growth. He is the founding Chair of the newly formed Civil Engineering program at UVic.

Matt Horne is the City of Vancouver’s climate policy manager. He is responsible for delivering on the City’s commitment to have 100% of the energy used in Vancouver come from renewable sources before 2050. He also advises senior management, and mayor and council on climate change policy issues. Prior to joining the City, Matt worked for the Pembina Institute helping to advance climate change policy in B.C. and across Canada. He has a Master of Resource Management degree from Simon Fraser University, and a Bachelor of Industrial Engineering degree from Dalhousie University.