Prof. Sarah Burch holds a Canada Research Chair in Sustainability Governance and Innovation, and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo, Canada. Her research, writing and teaching focus on transformative responses to climate change at the community scale, innovative strategies for making progress on sustainability, the unique contributions that small businesses can make to this solving this complex challenge. She was named to Canada’s Top 40 under 40TM in 2018, and elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists in 2017.
Dr. Burch is a Coordinating Lead Author of the Earth System Governance project’s New Directions Initiative, which is creating the Science and Implementation Plan that will inform the research of an international network of more than 500 environmental governance scholars over the next 10 years. She was a Contributing Author to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007), and will be a Lead Author in the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report beginning in 2018.
Dr. Burch holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia, was a Visiting Research Associate at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute. Her most recent book is entitled ‘Understanding Climate Change: Science, Policy and Practice,’ and she taught the first Massive Open Online Course on climate change, which reached thousands over students in over 130 countries.
