IRES Newsletter: March 2026

News, Events and Updates

As Vancouver gears up to host seven FIFA World Cup matches, IRES alum Sveinar Soldal is worried that environmental forethought does not appear to be a central priority. He suggests that waste management may be one area where meaningful progress is possible.

Read Sveinar's article

Join us for our student symposium, given by four IRES grad students!

Talk titles:

1. “Birding is like a gateway drug”: The role of bird observation in urban human-nature relationships

2. Exploring Non-Indigenous City Employees' Emotions and Responsibilities in the Implementation of Vancouver's UNDRIP Strategy

3. Listening to the River: Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Relationships with Water

4. Assessing the Impacts of Organic Farming Practices on Farm Economics and Climate Resilience in British Columbia

Learn more

The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions highlighted Charlotte Milne in a video and online report! Charlotte's work advocating for Semá:th First Nation flood rights through mapping is supported with a 2025 PICS scholarship.

Learn more

This talk explores how human disturbance shapes risks and resources for wild animals, and how responses of animals can have implications for ecological dynamics and human societies. This can help inform more effective biodiversity conservation and human-wildlife coexistence on an increasingly crowded planet.

Learn more

This session offers a broad overview of the history and implementation of the US federal Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), also known as Superfund, that governs the cleanup of historical hazardous material waste sites.

Learn more

Recent IRES Publications

Joséphine Gantois, Samantha Gorle, Chloë Chang, and Jeremy Kerr. 2026. Monitoring biodiversity across agroecosystems: insights from Southern Ontario. FACETS. 11: 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1139/facets-2025-0424

Kristen Hopewell [IRES Faculty Associate]. 2026. Efforts to secure landmark WTO fisheries subsidies agreement blocked. Marine Policy.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2026.107091

Bäthge, A., Vargas, C.R., Lischeid, G... Huggins, X. 2026. A Global-Scale Time Series Dataset for Groundwater Studies within the Earth System. Sci Data. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06966-1

Scott, Ted J., Rachel H. White, and Simon Donner. "Summers over land and ocean are becoming longer, transitioning faster, and accumulating more heat." Environmental Research Letters (2026).

O’Hara, C. C., Baez-Schon, M., Chaplin-Kramer, R., Cheng, S. H., Echeverri, A., Galford, G. L., ...Jiaying Zhao, & Halpern, B. S. (2026). A systematic map of methods for assessing societal benefits of Earth science information. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123(6), e2524370123.

External job postings, graduate student opportunities, and External Events are sent as individual emails. 

To receive other IRES-relevant opportunities, please subscribe to

IRES-External-Jobs@LISTS.UBC.CA for external job opportunities,
IRES-External-Events@LISTS.UBC.CA for external events,
IRES-Grad-Opportunities@LISTS.UBC.CA for workshops, conferences, volunteer-ships, etc for graduate students.

Learn more

Have news to share or want to unsubscribe? Email us at:
communications@ires.ubc.ca