The Fight for Climate after Covid-19: A conversation with Alice C. Hill

The catastrophic risks of pandemics and climate change carry deep uncertainty as to when they will occur, how they will unfold, and how much damage they will do. The most important question is how we can face these risks to minimize them most.

Alice C. Hill’s book, The Fight for Climate after COVID-19, draws on the troubled and uneven COVID-19 experience to illustrate the critical need to ramp up resilience rapidly and effectively on a global scale. Just as our society has transformed itself to meet the challenge of coronavirus, so too will we need to adapt our thinking and our policies to combat the ever-increasing threat of climate change. Unapologetic and clear-eyed, The Fight for Climate after COVID-19 helps us understand why the time has come to prepare for the world as it will be, rather than as it once was.

In this author discussion Alice exposes parallels between the underutilized measures that governments should have taken to contain the spread of COVID-19. Measures such as early action, cross-border planning, and bolstering emergency preparation – are steps leaders can take now to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Speaker/Performer Biographies

Alice C. Hill

Alice C. Hill is an expert on building resilience to catastrophic risks. She previously served as Special Assistant to President Barack Obama and Senior Director for Resilience Policy on the National Security Council staff where she led the development of national policy, including executive orders related to natural disasters, national security, and climate change. Prior to this, she served as senior counselor to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). After years of working alongside public health and resilience experts crafting policy to build both pandemic and climate change preparedness, Alice currently serves as the David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment at the Council on Foreign Relations and was a Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. In 2020, Yale University and the Op-Ed Project awarded her the Public Voices Fellowship on the Climate Crisis.

Chair

Liz Grant

Liz Grant is Director of the Global Health Academy and Assistant Principal Global Health at the University of Edinburgh. She is responsible for developing and supporting global health partnerships with colleagues in low- and middle-income country (LMIC) communities. She is a co-director of the University of Edinburgh’s Global Compassion Initiative, developing work on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the science of compassion, and the contribution that faith communities make to the SDGs. Liz currently chairs the Research Committee for the Consortium of Universities for Global Health, (CUGH), an association of over 170 Academic institutions training in Global Health. She has worked for NHS Lothian’s Public Health Directorate leading an HIV partnership between the NHS and Zambia. She has been an advisor to a number of global health charities and serves as a trustee for CBM Scotland.

Book details:

Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

ISBN: 9780197549704

Length: 224 pages

This event will be live-captioned.

The Fight for Climate after Covid-19 – A Watch Party

Alternatively, come together to watch the online discussion with peers. The Data + Design Lab is hosting an IRL watch party for The Fight for Climate after Covid-19: A conversation with Alice C. Hill at Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Newington, EH8 9AB.

This space is open to all. Book a spot here…