Keynote speaker

Michael H. Glantz received a BS in 1961 (Metallurgical Engineering), and an MA (1963) and PhD (1970) in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania. After a few years in industry as an engineer with Renault, Westinghouse and Ford Motor Company, he studied political development with regard to the national movements of independence until the early 1970s. He joined the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado as a postdoctoral fellow where he began to focus on climate-related impacts on societies and ecosystems. His first studies focused on the five-year (1968-73) drought in the West African Sahel, drought in the Canadian Prairies and the societal value of an El Niño forecast. In 1979 Glantz was appointed the head of NCAR’s ESIG (Environmental and Societal Impacts Group, a position he held until 1997. In 1999 he received funds from the UN Foundation to undertake a 16-country study on lessons learned from the 1997-98 El Niño event. The report was published under the title Once burned, twice shy (UNU Press, 2001). In 2008 Glantz, NCAR’s only senior social scientist in its 50 year history, created the Consortium for Capacity Building (CCB) at the University of Colorado after having received a 2-year million dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Glantz’s CCB was designated as a Clinton Global Initiative.

In 2003 he published Climate Affairs: A Primer, which proposed a multidisciplinary approach to the study of climate-society-environment interactions. Glantz has written and edited more than 30 books and scores of articles on climate-related impacts issues and has organized more than 30 international multidisciplinary workshops on climate, water, weather and society for several UN agencies. At this stage of his career he is focused on climate related undergraduate and post graduate education and training and has fostered the notion of a Sparetime University. For the past few years he has also focused on “lessons earned about disaster risk reduction in a changing climate.”