2017 AMS Annual Meeting

The AMS Short Course on Environmental Security will be held on 22 January 2017, preceding the 97th AMS Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington. 

As AMS prepares to celebrate its centennial, we look ahead to the next 100 years. How will weather and climate shape the future of our world? Potentially, we could be facing crippling shortages of food, water, and energy as the global population approaches 9–10 billion by mid-century – all within the landscape of a changing global climate. How will our profession sort out the impacts and help policymakers build strategies for risk mitigation, adaptation, and resiliency? Environmental Security (ES) provides such a framework:

…an interdisciplinary study of the effects of extreme environmental or climatic events that can act locally or transnationally to destabilize countries or regions of the world, resulting in geopolitical instability, resource conflicts, vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure, or some combination of these impacts.[1]

The course begins by examining the interconnectivity among water, energy, and food, and their ultimate dependence on weather and climate. We look at population dynamics as a complicating factor that cannot be ignored, and provide definitions of national, homeland, and human security in order to put these environmental impacts into a policy context. The “cascading effects” from extreme events, to destabilization, to security impacts are covered by means of case studies. 

The course is aimed at two primary groups: 1. Students and early-career professionals who are interested in taking an “out-of-the-box” look at how weather and climate can impact regional and world events; 2. Senior-level professionals who stand to improve their understanding of the connectivity between technical and policy concepts by seeing the potential impacts of extreme weather events and climate change placed within this unique context.

The course format consists of one half-day of lectures followed by several hours of hands-on case-study analysis to reinforce the concepts covered during the morning lectures.

The instructors for the course are:

Dr. John Lanicci, Colonel, USAF (Retired), Professor of Meteorology, Embry-Riddle University

Dr. David Titley, Rear Admiral, USN (Retired), Director of the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk, Penn State University

Attendees will be on their own for lunch; adequate time will be provided. Attendees are strongly encouraged to bring their laptops and/or tablets to the course.

For more information please contact John Lanicci at Embry-Riddle Univ., 600 S. Clyde Morris Blvd., Daytona Beach, FL 32114 (tel: 386-226-6856; email: [email protected]).