Sarah Burch

Sarah holds a Canada Research Chair in Sustainability Governance and Innovation, and is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo. She is an expert on transformative responses to climate change at the community level, innovative strategies for making progress on sustainability and the unique contributions that small businesses can make to solving this complex challenge.

Sarah is a coordinating lead author of the Earth System Governance project’s New Directions initiative, which is creating the science and implementation plan that will inform the research of an international network of more than 3,000 environmental governance scholars over the next 10 years. She was a contributing author to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

Sarah holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia, was a visiting research associate at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute and was recently elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars. Her most recent book is entitled Understanding Climate Change: Science, Policy and Practice. She teaches the first massive open online course on climate change, which reaches thousands of students in more than 130 countries.