Episode description

Mark Burgman is Director of the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Conservation Biology.  He is author of Trusting Judgments: How to Get the Best Out of Experts. Previously, he was Adrienne Clarke Chair of Botany at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He works on expert judgement, ecological modelling, conservation biology and risk assessment.  He has written models for biosecurity, medicine regulation, marine fisheries, forestry, irrigation, electrical power utilities, mining, and national park planning.  He received a BSc from the University of New South Wales, an MSc from Macquarie University, Sydney, and a PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He worked as a consultant ecologist and research scientist in Australia, the United States and Switzerland during the 1980’s before joining the University of Melbourne in 1990. He joined CEP in February, 2017. He has published over two hundred and fifty refereed papers and book chapters and seven authored books. He was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2006.

“In the context of cities, I think it's tough to answer. We hope that cities will become more sustainable. We hope that people living in cities will reduce their consumption of carbon-emitting fuels, but there is no global indication that the momentum in that direction is increasing appreciatively. The growth of the middle classes in large, developing economies of the BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the information that I have is that the consumption practices in those environments, cultures, and places are going to accelerate. It's not going to decelerate over the next 20 or 30 years. And that generates a large amount of momentum. There are going to be a great many new cities over the next 50 years. Hundreds and hundreds of cities that have more than a million people. We hope that the development of those cities will be built around sustainable practices, but that's an optimistic view.”

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