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Prof Rachel Warren on the impacts of climate change at COP26

A number of climate experts from the University of East Anglia will be available for interview during the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. Their areas of expertise range from the impact of climate change on biodiversity, climate geoengineering and carbon removal, to the impact of climate change on sovereign credit ratings, carbon uptake by the oceans, and gender and climate change. Among them is Prof Rachel Warren, Professor of Global Change and Environmental Biology, from UEA's School of Environmental Sciences and Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. Her research areas and expertise cover the impacts of climate change on biodiversity. She is an IPCC author and available for interview on topics including climate change policy and modelling, climate change mitigation and adaptation, the impact of climate on ecosystems and species, and sustainability in the context of the Paris Agreement goals to limit global warming to well below 2oC.

Greenhouse gas removal expert Dr Nem Vaugham on COP26

A number of climate experts from the University of East Anglia will be available for interview during the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. Their areas of expertise range from the impact of climate change on biodiversity, climate geoengineering and carbon removal, to the impact of climate change on sovereign credit ratings, carbon uptake by the oceans, and gender and climate change. Among them is Dr Nem Vaughan, Associate Professor in Climate Change, at UEA's School of Environmental Sciences and Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research Her research areas and expertise cover greenhouse gas removal, and technologies and practices that aim to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. She is currently the Principal Investigator of a NERC funded four-year consortium project on the Feasibility of Afforestation and Biomass energy with carbon capture and storage for Greenhouse Gas Removal. Her main interest is in climate change mitigation – ways to reduce emissions, to decarbonise and adopt new forms of energy. She is exploring the options of particular technologies and practices for reducing and removing carbon emissions – including biomass energy carbon capture with storage, and afforestation (the introduction of new trees). She recently co-authored an article in The Conversation on the issues around carbon removal: A global carbon removal industry is coming – experts explain the problems it must overcome.

Environmental economics expert Dr Brock on COP26

A number of climate experts from the University of East Anglia will be available for interview during the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. Their areas of expertise range from the impact of climate change on biodiversity, climate geoengineering and carbon removal, to the impact of climate change on sovereign credit ratings, carbon uptake by the oceans, and gender and climate change. Among them is Associate Professor in Microeconomics, Dr Mike Brock, from UEA's School of Economics. His research areas and expertise cover environmental and behavioural economics, recycling and environmental valuation. He explores how (and why) people behave in a more sustainable or environmental way. Particular projects include financial incentives to encourage recycling through lottery techniques and the use of competitive rankings on personal use of energy to stimulate energy reduction. Mike has also explored people’s behaviours towards wildlife – for example why people flock to see newly-identified species of birds and the environmental of that behaviour.

Environmental governance expert Prof Heike Schroeder to attend COP26

A number of climate experts from the University of East Anglia will be attending the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. Their areas of expertise range from the impact of climate change on biodiversity, climate geoengineering and carbon removal, to the impact of climate change on sovereign credit ratings, carbon uptake by the oceans, and gender and climate change. Prof Heike Schroeder, from UEA's School of International Development, will attend COP in its second week, from November 7, as principle investigator for the INDIS project on Indigenous visions of sustainable development & climate resilience. Prof Schroeder's research and expertise covers global environmental politics, forest governance and REDD+, the international climate negotiations, urban climate governance, indigenous peoples/knowledge and sustainable development. The team will be showing how Indigenous knowledge might contribute towards national and international targets for climate mitigation, adaptation, and sustainable development. The value of Indigenous knowledge is often ignored by policy-makers, and Indigenous Peoples themselves have few opportunities to articulate and share their knowledge in a way that can impact policy making circles and strengthen sustainable futures. The project’s Indigenous partners from three countries (Uganda, Papua New Guinea, and Bolivia) will be presenting their own visions for just and environmentally sensitive futures. Where: Exhibit slot in the green zone on Mon, 8 Nov 1:00-2:30pm. The project will also have a slot in the IASS Pavilion in the Blue Zone in Week 2 covering findings and outputs.

Oceans expert Dr Bakker to attend COP26

A number of climate experts from the University of East Anglia will be attending the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. Their areas of expertise range from the impact of climate change on biodiversity, climate geoengineering and carbon removal, to the impact of climate change on sovereign credit ratings, carbon uptake by the oceans, and gender and climate change. Dr Dorothee Bakker will attend the first week of COP26 as part of the Integrated Carbon Observation System European Infrastructure Consortium (ICOS ERIC). Her areas of research and expertise cover processes affecting the air-sea transfer of natural long-lived greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide) and the marine carbon cycle in a changing climate. Dr Bakker chairs the SOCAT global group - SOCAT is a Global Ocean Observing System, with more than 100 contributors. Her brief: The ocean takes up a quarter of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. This uptake varies over time (between years and decades) for reasons that we do not fully understand. It is unclear how ocean CO2 uptake will respond when we move towards net zero. Measurements of (surface) ocean CO2 and their synthesis are therefore key for determining ocean CO2 uptake, now and in the future. However, funding for these measurements and their synthesis is precarious. Dr Bakker is currently investigating carbon cycling in UK shelf seas and the Southern and Arctic Oceans. She is a co-author of this year’s Global Carbon Budget paper (for SOCAT synthesis of ocean CO2 measurements).

UCI scientists study the effects of an oil spill on Orange County's coastline

Joana Tavares and Melissa Brock, a Ph.D student in ecology and evolutionary biology, are spearheading the newly formed Southern California Oil Spill Project at UCI. They are analyzing the composition and health of the phytoplankton and bacterial communities in the ocean and inland waterways, using samples collected before, during, and ultimately after the oil spill situation has played out. Also, the cleanup of the oil spill off the coast of Huntington Beach earlier this month is essentially complete, but responsibility for the spill has yet to be assigned. In the coming months, and possibly years, it will be the legal system that determines liability — and damages. Michael Robinson-Dorn, a clinical professor of law, co-associate dean for experiential education at the law school and director of UCI’s Environmental Law Clinic, joins the UCI Podcast to discuss how this spill compares to past ones, why simply shutting down offshore drilling is more challenging than it may seem and how society’s values will shape the future of oil drilling in California. For more information or to contact the researchers, email Brian Bell at bpbell@uci.edu.

UCI experts can discuss California's Climate Crisis

For the past half century, UC Irvine has been home to some of the world’s leading experts on the environment, energy, oceans and atmosphere in the Golden State. To share their stories, UCI today is launching a web special report, “California’s Climate Crisis.” Through its three main sections – The Problem, Human Impacts and Solutions – the site offers dozens of feature articles, videos, podcast recordings and photographs, with plans for ongoing updates and new stories. The materials outline the UCI researchers’ understanding of the climate issues facing California and the extent to which they are working to counteract the dilemma. The site includes an experts' page. Contact Tom Vasich at 949-285-6455 or tmvasich@uci.edu for more information.

Corporate Social Responsibility Builds Investor Trust

There’s little doubt that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a good thing for businesses. Whether it’s taking positive action on society, communities, the climate, or the planet, strong corporate citizenship tends to play well with the public, the media, and consumers alike. And that can translate into wins in terms of brand equity and reputation. What is perhaps less clear are the concrete business returns that ethical business practices may or may not generate. Or, whether doing the right thing can create value for firms beyond image, brand, and customer or employee engagement. To shed light on this, Goizueta Assistant Professor of Accounting Suhas A. Sridharan, has taken a rather novel approach. Together with colleagues from the universities of LUISS Guido Carli, Nazarbayev University, and IDC Herzliya, Sridharan has published a new study using measures of disclosure credibility to understand whether CSR builds investor trust and drives tangible benefits for corporations. Corporate Social Responsibility Does Reap Rewards “Disclosure credulity refers to how much your investors trust the information your organization provides – how much faith they have in your company’s ability to accurately convey opportunities for growth, and perhaps more critically, to navigate risk and uncertainty,” says Sridharan. “Because CSR and responsible business practices have a role in addressing a range of risks–from climate change and environmental factors to socio-economic or political uncertainty and the impact on supply chains, talent and so on–we reasoned CSR can impact investor trust and disclosure credibility. And disclosure credibility, in turn, can impact investor decision-making and business outcomes.” To study disclosure credibility, and capture shifts in investor sentiment towards firms, Sridharan and her colleagues decided to use the link between share prices and company earnings announcements–the public statements on profitability that firms are obliged to make over different periods. “Earnings announcements are among the most salient and recurring areas of corporate disclosure, and managers and investors pay very close attention to them,” Sridharan says. “Because of the nature of the information they contain, they have a direct link to security price discovery – the price that firms and investors will agree to buy and sell shares in the company. Simply put, earnings announcements can be used to examine how much investors value a firm.” As reports, earnings announcements are also highly complex and typically time-consuming to process. Because of this, Sridharan and her colleagues opted to look at just how quickly or slowly investors were reading announcements and responding to them – and how quickly or slowly stock prices were adjusting to reflect earnings news within a five-day window after earnings announcements, as well as a longer period to allow for potential overreaction or error. More Disclosure Credibility Equals Faster Results Sridharan explains, “The intuition we brought to the study was that the more investors trust a firm’s disclosures, the more efficient or faster they will be to process its earnings report; in other words, the more they will be likely to take the report on face value and less inclined to dig into the finer minutiae or question its findings.” Adopting this approach, she and her colleagues then compared and contrasted investor response to earnings reports from different firms, with greater or less involvement in CSR activities. In total, they looked at a large-scale sample of more than 19,000 annual earnings announcements from just under 3,000 U.S. firms over a 25-year period, between 1992 and 2017. Using Morgan Stanley Capital International environmental, social, and governance ratings, they were also able to determine the degree of firm-level CSR across their dataset during this period. Crunching the numbers, Sridharan and fellow researchers were able to arrive at a concrete conclusion: CSR measurably increases investor trust and disclosure credibility. “When we estimated our regression models, we found clear evidence that corporate social responsibility does indeed contribute to the average speed of price discovery around earnings announcements; and it does so positively. Our results reveal that CSR increases the speed with which stock prices incorporate earnings news. Breaking it right down, we see that a one unit increase in CSR activities corresponds to 1.96 percent increase in the average timeliness or efficiency of reported earnings.” In other words, investors are reacting more quickly and favorably to performance reports made by organizations with more demonstrated social responsibility. “We know that these types of announcements are lengthy and dense; they take time to process,” Sridharan says. “So, the intuition here is that when your firm plants a flag on responsibility and accountability, investors are more likely to take your disclosures at face value – they’re more likely to trust what you’re saying.” Organizations would do well to take this finding on board, says Sridharan; especially in today’s climate of high volatility and uncertainty. Having investors on board is critical in weathering the bad times along with the good, she adds, and CSR can be a game-changing tool in building that necessary trust. The Wild West of the Regulatory Landscape Sridharan’s paper also informs the regulatory landscape around corporate responsibility which is still in its infancy and which she likens to something of a “Wild West.” “The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other regulators are increasingly focused on improving the functioning of capital markets and understanding the role of CSR,” she says. “The SEC has included an examination of climate and ESG-related risks among its 2021 examination priorities which also underscores a growing investor interest in these issues. At the same time, research is showing that CSR can be misused or simply deployed to benefit managers looking to score reputational points with stakeholders–at the expense of shareholders. By demonstrating that investor perceptions of firms are materially shaped by firms’ CSR activities, our study highlights the importance of–and helps build the case for–monitoring and regulating firms’ CSR activities.” Suhas A. Sridharan is an Assistant Professor of Accounting at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. Sridharan studies investors' use of information to assess risk and resolve uncertainty, particularly around issues of political economy. She is available to speak with media about the importantance of CSR - simply click on her icon now to arrange an interview today.

Infrastructure and extreme weather expert on recent weather events

Hiba Baroud, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, is available for commentary on recent extreme weather events, including hurricanes, tropical storms and flooding. Baroud is an expert on infrastructure and climate change as they pertain to extreme weather events. She can speak to the potential dangers of the destruction and the cleanup decisions affected areas must make, including those that can help prepare for the future. Topics she can discuss include: How weathers and disasters are becoming more frequent and intense, therefore costing us more. Why cities must prepare before extreme weather hits, making future-based predictions and not just relying on historical data to understand potential concerns. With that, cities must also focus on restoration after an event happens, rather than prevention Additional dangers to residents' lives to be considered once the weather has passed - such as a lack of food and water, lack of power and road infrastructure issues

Environmental scientist on heat wave in western U.S.

Jonathan Gilligan, Associate Professor of Earth & Environmental Science and Civil & Environmental Engineering at Vanderbilt University, is available for commentary on the recent heat waves and how climate change plays a role. Professor Gilligan's research focuses on global climate change and environmental policy. He also serves on Vanderbilt's Climate Change Research Network, which focuses on the reduction of carbon emissions from individuals and households. He can speak to how climate change is affecting our temperatures and future related trends we might see.