Cyclox and the Oxford Pedestrians Association (OxPA) will be welcoming representatives of the bus companies that serve Oxford to a meeting to discuss the relationship between bikes, buses and pedestrians on the city’s busy streets.

Richard Mann, an Oxford-based transport and liveable cities consultant, will open the meeting with a presentation on how to make an excellent bus network and lead a discussion with contributions from Phil Southall of the Oxford Bus Company and Martin Sutton of Stagecoach.

There will be plenty of opportunities for questions and discussion from the floor, which will make for a very interesting event for anyone interested in how we move around our city. This is a public meeting so please come and add your voice to the debate.

How can the human economy become more sustainable in the face of a rapidly changing climate? Professor Cameron Hepburn, Director of the Economics of Sustainability programme at The Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, will discuss new ways of assessing climate and economic risk, how to stimulate innovation in greener technologies, and the impacts of climate policy on the economy.

Join in on Twitter #2015climate

Alongside global warming, the destruction of the world’s biodiversity and natural capital threatens to undermine economic growth. Another 3 billion people and a world economy some 16 times bigger by 2100 threatens environmental destruction on a scale which would make the twentieth century look positively benign. On current policies, natural capital – those assets nature gives us for free – will be massively depleted and undermine economies. To put growth on a sustainable basis requires that natural assets are taken seriously – in national and corporate accounts, on balance sheets, and by providing compensation for damage, pollution taxes and a nature fund. This lecture sets out how to do this, how to start restoring natural capital, and why it is necessary for sustainable economic growth.

Speaker: Prof Dieter Helm. Dieter is an Official Fellow in Economics at New College, Oxford, Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Oxford and Professorial Research Fellow of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. He is Chair of the Natural Capital Committee and a Director of Aurora Energy Research Ltd. The revised edition of his most recent book, Natural Capital – Valuing The Planet, is due to be published in May by Yale University Press.

Earth System scientists believe the Earth has entered a new epoch in the Geological Time Scale, the Anthropocene or ‘the Age of Man’, in which humans now rival the great forces of nature in determining the geological trajectory of the planet. The new epoch, driven mainly by human-induced climate change, represents a rupture in Earth history with profound consequences for humankind and the Earth System itself. The concept grew out of the new discipline of Earth System science, a ‘paradigm shift’. A number of scientists and social scientists have put forward interpretations of the Anthropocene that, mostly unconsciously, deflate the significance of the new epoch and the threat it poses to humankind and the Earth. It has variously been equated with the Holocene, interpreted as just another instance of ecological or landscape change, rendered banal by the discovery of historical ‘precursors’, and framed as a welcome opportunity for humans to remake the Earth. Each of these can be shown to be a misreading of Earth System science.

Clive Hamilton is an Australian academic and author. His books include Growth Fetish (Pluto Press), Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change (Earthscan) and Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering (Yale UP). He is the co-editor (with Christophe Bonneuil and Francois Gemenne) of the just-released The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking modernity in a new epoch (Routledge). Clive is currently writing a book on the larger meaning of the Anthropocene. He is currently Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. He has held various visiting academic positions, including at Yale University, Sciences Po and the University of Oxford.

Human-caused global warming has been making headlines for over two decades, but people’s opinions on it often depend on what headlines they’re reading. How is it that a scientific theory has become so politicised? Join us to hear Adam Levy (Nature, University of Oxford; @ClimateAdam), a climate change scientist and YouTuber, discuss the key scientific evidence behind climate change, and explain why perspectives on climate change shouldn’t be a matter of belief.
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Droughts threaten societies, economies and ecosystems worldwide. Yet our ability to characterise and predict the occurrence, duration and intensity of droughts, as well as minimise their impacts, is often inadequate.

This symposium brings together global experts and will showcase multidisciplinary research being undertaken on droughts from across the world. There are three themes:

-UK Drought Science and Policy
-Understanding the social dimensions of drought
-Drought Science and Policy from around the world

Confirmed speakers:

-Professor Jim Hall, University of Oxford, UK
-Professor Lee Godden, Melbourne University, Australia
-Professor Casey Brown, University of Massachusetts, United States
-Professor Christopher Duffy, Penn State University, United States
-Professor Greg Garfin, University of Arizona, United States
-Dr Peter Wallbrink, CSIRO, Australia

The Oxford Architecture Society lecture series

Lisa Finlay is coming to speak to us from Heatherwick Studio.
Established by Thomas Heatherwick in 1994, Heatherwick Studio is recognised for its work in architecture, urban infrastructure, sculpture, design and strategic thinking. At the heart of the studio’s work is a profound commitment to finding innovative design solutions, with a dedication to artistic thinking and the latent potential of materials and craftsmanship. In the twenty years of its existence, Heatherwick Studio has worked in many countries, with a wide range of commissioners and in a variety of regulatory environments.

Part 3 of a three-part mini-series on notation: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic.

Part 1 was Reading Slough and London Paddington: the persistent lure of spelling reform (July 16th). Part 2 was Writing little messages in Italian: the social origins of music notation (August 20th).

Free entry, no need to book. You’re welcome to come along just to listen, or to take part actively in the discussion. The meeting room will be indicated on the display screen just inside the Town Hall entrance lobby.

Join us for the Oxford launch of the new NoNonsense series

Panelists:

Maggie Black, author of NoNonsense International Development

A former co-editor of New Internationalist, Maggie has written numerous books on development subjects. She has worked as a consultant writer and editor for UN and other international organizations and for NGOs including Save the Children, WaterAid and Anti-Slavery International. She is also the author of the No-Nonsense Guide to International Development.

Peter Stalker, author of NoNonsense The Money Crisis

Peter is a former co-editor of the New Internationalist who now works as a communications consultant to UN agencies. He has edited the global Human Development Report, and produced many other UN reports on economic and social issues. He is also the author of the No-Nonsense Guide to International Migration.

Danny Chivers, author of NoNonsense Renewable Energy

Danny is an environmental writer, carbon analyst and performance poet. He is actively involved in climate justice groups such as Art Not Oil, Reclaim the Power and No Dash For Gas. He is also the author of The No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change.

The launch will begin with a panel discussion, introduced and led by Chris Brazier (New Internationalist Co-editor) along with special guest Danny Dorling (Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, and author of many books including the No-Nonsense Guide to Equality and Inequality and the 1%).

The discussion will be followed by an opportunity for questions from the audience, drinks and a chance to buy copies of the new series.

About the NoNonsense Series:

The all-new NoNonsense books cut through the noise and hype surrounding today’s big issues. Concise, comprehensive and critical, they get to the heart of the matter.

FAQs

What are the transport/parking options getting to the event?

Ruskin College is easily accessible by car with ample free parking on site.

Local buses: 280 and U1 — exit at Headington Shops.

Conceptions of Enlightenment is a one-day conference concluding in a public lecture at 5pm. The lecture will be delivered by Dennis Rasmussen (Tufts University, Boston), author of The Pragmatic Enlightenment (CUP, 2014).

Over the last century, historians and philosophers have used the term ‘Enlightenment’ in diverse ways. Was it primarily a philosophical movement, or did it involve a much wider change of outlook and sensibility in the course of the eighteenth century? Did its origins and centre lie in England, the Netherlands, France, or Scotland? Did it establish the human rights and freedoms we now value, or did it in practice subject humanity to rigidly rational systems of control? Did it give a voice to women and colonial subjects, or did it reinforce male domination and European hegemony over the rest of the world? Did it prepare the way for the French Revolution and the Reign of terror, or is its heritage to be found in the American Declaration of Independence?

To discuss such questions, a number of leading scholars of the Enlightenment will introduce the work of some of the historians and philosophers who have been most influential in shaping this much-debated concept.

To avoid dangerous climate change will require not only very steep cuts in emissions, but also the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Most of the models that avoid dangerous climate change do so by assuming that it will be possible to deploy a technique called biomass energy with carbon capture and storage (or BECCS for short) at a very large scale. But is this realistic?

Please join us for a public discussion to explore this issue. To what extent may it be possible to use biomass as a way of both generating electricity and removing carbon dioxide from the air? What are the likely impacts of such an approach – on climate change, on food supply, on biodiversity and on the will to reduce emissions.

The Oxford Martin School has brought together four excellent speakers with expertise in this field. Dr Craig Jamieson has explored the potential of using waste material from rice production for BECCS, Professor Tim Lenton has modelled how much biomass could be used for BECCS given projected population growth and dietary habits, Professor Nick Pidgeon is an expert on the social acceptability of new technologies and Dr Doug Parr is the Chief Scientist and Policy Director at Greenpeace.

Demographic changes across the world pose one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. Longer lifespans and shifting fertility rates bring with them an array of global health issues. In this lecture, Professor Sarah Harper, Co-Director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, will talk about the causes and effects of population change and the global age structural shift, and Professor Robyn Norton, Co-Director of The George Institute for Global Health, will address the implications of these changes on global health.

The extraction of oil and the mining of coal are devastating communities across the world. These operations have forced people from their land, polluted the environment, and led to widespread human rights violations.

According to the Colombia Human Rights Data Analysis Group, an estimated 9,000 people were murdered and 3,000 have disappeared in Casanare over the past two decades. One of those kidnapped was Gilberto Torres, who is bringing a case for compensation against BP and other oil companies in the High Court in London with the help of law firm Deighton Pierce Glynn (DPG) in the UK and Francisco Ramirez Cuellar in Colombia.

The Centre for Global Politics, Economy and Society at Oxford Brookes University, and UCU Oxford Brookes would like to invite you to a special event as part of the campaign tour ‘OIL JUSTICE NOW! Stop Corporate Impunity’ led by the NGO War on Want in partnership with the law firm Deighton Pierce Glynn and the organisation Cos-Pacc (see attached poster for further details).

Speakers are:

– Sue Wilman (Human Rights Lawyer, Deighton Pierce Glynn)
– Gilberto Torres (Former trade unionist with Union Sindical Obrera in Colombia)
– Dr Lara Montesinos Coleman (University of Sussex)
– Francisco Ramirez Cuellar (trade unionist and lawyer with the Colombian Unified Trade Union Federation)

Gilberto Torres is a former trade unionist with Union Sindical Obrera, representing workers in the oil industry. He was abducted and tortured by paramilitaries in 1992 and now lives in exile. Gilberto believes his abduction was ordered and assisted by Ocensa, a joint venture pipeline company part-owned and operated by BP.

Francisco Ramirez Cuellar is a trade unionist and lawyer with the Colombian Unified Trade Union Federation. He has been targeted and threatened because of his legal and campaigning work challenging multinationals who have committed serious environmental and human right abuses in Colombia.

Chaired by Dr Maia Pal (Oxford Brookes University)

Renewable energy is a strong component in the race to mitigate climate change, and solar power is a particularly cheap and viable green energy option. Considering current technologies, cost, markets and infrastructure, Professor Henry Snaith, Co-Director of the Programme on Solar Energy: Organic Photovoltaics, and Professor Malcolm McCulloch, Head of the University of Oxford’s Electrical Power Group and Co-Director of The Oxford Martin Programme on Integrating Renewable Energy, will debate whether solar is indeed the answer to the urgent question of irreversible climate change.

Centre for Global Politics, Economics and Society seminar series

Professor Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, will explore the huge technological, scientific and environmental shifts that have led to humanity’s current state, and consider the choices that will determine our long-term future.

Over the last few decades there have been many initiatives to bring about the recovery of populations of scarce or declining bird species in the UK. This has resulted in some notable successes, with species such as Red Kite and bittern. However such schemes do not always meet with immediate success. Having been involved in many recovery projects over many years, Ken Smith will look at some of the successes and also examine why it is not always easy or possible to bring about recovery

Speaker: Professor Walter Kälin (Envoy of the Chairmanship of the Nansen Initiative, and Professor of Constitutional and International Law, University of Bern)

Disaster displacement is one of the big humanitarian challenges of our times and is likely to significantly increase in the context of climate change. Building on the work of the Nansen Initiative on disaster-induced cross-border displacement, the lecture will explore different tools available to address displacement and other forms of disaster-related human mobility.

About the speaker
Professor Walter Kälin is a Swiss international human rights lawyer, legal scholar, and advocate. Currently, he is professor of constitutional and international law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Bern (Switzerland), and Envoy of the Chairmanship of the Nansen Initiative. He served as a member of the UN Human Rights Committee until the end of 2014. From 2004 until 2010, he was the Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General on Internally Displaced Persons. Professor Kälin is the author of numerous works including The Face of Human Rights (2004) and The Law of International Human Rights Protection (2009). He received his doctor of law from the University of Bern and his LL.M. from Harvard University.

Free and open to all, but registration is required.

“This is a good day for businesses…” says Dan Kelly, President, CEO and Chair, Canadian Federation of Independent Business. Maybe so, but CETA, like other trade-deals, is bad news for equality, democracy and the environment.
In early 2016, CETA, the Canada-EU trade deal is due to be debated and voted on in the European parliament. Like TTIP, CETA allows corporations to sue governments in secret courts over decisions they don’t like.
As part of the growing movement against corporate trade deals and to try to stop final agreement of CETA, we’re planning a speaker tour.
The speakers will be:
• Maude Barlow, chair of citizens’ group the Council of Canadians
• Yash Tandon, Ugandan trade expert and author of Trade is War
• Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now

Join your colleagues, friends and mentors at this event to see teams present their projects and find out who will be awarded funding!

The Carbon Innovation Programme is an opportunity for students and staff at the University of Oxford to generate unique ideas for carbon reduction across the University’s Functional Estate. Teams or individuals have the opportunity to receive full funding to deliver their innovative carbon saving projects over the coming academic year (2015/16) whilst also receiving mentoring from industry experts. Successful candidates may have the option to discuss internships and career opportunities.

Prof. Harberd will discuss the writing of his book ‘Seed to Seed’, in particular, the fusion of the experimental scientific approach to nature with more traditional ‘natural history’ writing. ‘Seed to Seed’, which shows how science can enhance our vision of the world, was published to international critical acclaim by Bloomsbury in 2006.

Nicholas Harberd was a project leader at the world-renowned John Innes Centre in Norwich for many years. In 2008 he became Sibthorpian Professor of Plant Science at the University of Oxford, and was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2009.

Professor Carl Heneghan will deliver an interactive workshop, taking an evidence-based approach to answering your own clinical questions.

With over 20 year’s experience in clinical epidemiology, Professor Heneghan has over 200 peer reviewed publications that all started with a clinical question.

Climate predictions provide key scientific input into climate policy – and will continue to do so in future years. Professor Tim Palmer, Co-Director of the Programme on Modelling and Predicting Climate, will discuss how scientific and technical advances can be expected to improve our climate predictive capability in the coming years – for example through the application of inexact supercomputers, about which James Martin himself was especially enthusiastic. With projects like the Large Hadron Collider in mind, Tim will also discuss possible changes in the way climate prediction science organises itself internationally. Finally, Tim will address the important question of how to attract more mathematicians and theoretical physicists into the field of climate science.

The Symposium, celebrating Ada Lovelace’s 200th birthday on 10 December 2015, is aimed at a broad audience of those interested in the history and culture of mathematics and computer science, presenting current scholarship on Lovelace’s life and work, and linking her ideas to contemporary thinking about mathematics, computing and artificial intelligence.

The Symposium takes place in the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford, with a reception at the new Weston Library (Bodleian) and dinner at Balliol College on 9 December.

Other activities will include a workshop for early career researchers, and a ‘Music and Machines’ event. For more information and for the full line up of speakers please visit: http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/adalovelace/symposium/

*Registration*

Standard Registration, December 9-10: £40
Gala Dinner Ticket, December 9: £50

You can register and pay via the University of Oxford online-shop: http://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&catid=70&prodid=386

Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors, we have a limited number of student funded places available to cover registration and the conference dinner. These are open to students studying in UK universities in 2015-16. For more information please visit: http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/adalovelace/symposium/

Last year a number of thinkers launched “The Ecomodernist Manifesto” (www.ecomodernism.org). Ecomodernism argues that traditional environmentalism has advocated that human societies need to be reintegrated into natural systems. Instead, ecomodernism proposes that “decoupling” from natural systems, by encouraging urbanisation and using technologies such as nuclear power and plant genetic engineering, is a better way to feed and support billions of people in cities while still leaving more room for nature elsewhere. These ideas have been controversial!

Author Mark Lynas (an original signatory of the ecomodernist manifesto) will talk on this topic, with commentaries by Paul Jepson, Connie McDermott and Richard Grenyer, and a dissussion chaired by Yadvinder Malhi.

This event is hosted by the University of Oxford’s Biodiversity Cluster, Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests and Agile Ox

A wealth of new and advancing technologies are changing the way we approach research in healthcare. The use of big data sets, precision medicine and machine learning mean that research studies can be bigger, cheaper and wider reaching than ever before. In this lecture, Professor Martin Landray, Deputy Director of the Big Data Institute, and Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, will consider how recent advancements in healthcare technologies have radically changed how we go about medical research, and look at how future innovations could further shape the field.

Advancements in nanotechnology could fundamentally change global approaches to manufacturing, medicine, healthcare, and the environment. In this lecture Dr Eric Drexler, Senior Visiting Fellow, Oxford Martin School, will look at current advances in the field of advanced nanotechnology, and the impacts and potential applications of their widespread implementation, and Dr Sonia Trigueros, Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Nanotechnology, and Oxford Martin Senior Fellow, will consider how targeted nanomedicine could change how we treat disease in the future.

Hosted by Oxford School of Geography and the Environment and moderated by Danny Dorling.

Universal basic income (UBI) is an alternative form of social security, which posits that all people should receive an unconditional sum of money to pay for their survival needs. Despite its controversy, UBI has recently attracted considerable attention throughout the political spectrum and has even been enshrined in the programmes of leading European parties. Proponents argue that UBI would simplify welfare, reduce bureaucracy, incentivize creative work, improve the social distribution of wealth, and eliminate the conflict between labor and the need for automation in many areas of the economy.

To date the ReCivitas project remains one of only a handful of instances where UBI has been trialled in a real community. Cofounded by Marcus Brancaglione, this Brazilian NGO has successfully run a donation-funded basic income trial in a rural slum close to Sao Paulo since 2008. From its outset the project was guided by a libertarian ideal: to show that the satisfaction of basic survival needs is a human right that can be guaranteed without making people dependent on state patronage. However, ReCivitas also sees UBI as a developmental alternative to the preferred neoliberal tool of microfinance that so often fails in its mission to increase entrepreneurial investment in poor communities and to deliver people from poverty.

In this talk Brancaglione will present the lessons of the ReCivitas project, the effect UBI has had on its recipients and, in turn, on his own personal development. He will challenge prejudices against UBI and discuss the potential of UBI as a policy alternative in different countries, communities and economic contexts.

Marcus Brancaglione is the co-founder of ReCivitas, a Brazilian NGO that runs a groundbreaking basic income project in a rural slum close to São Paulo. Relying solely on donations, ReCivitas gives every villager an unconditional monthly payment of 30 Brazilian Reais. Brancaglione is also the creator of Governe-se, a platform for the promotion of direct democracy, and the alternative intellectual property licence, Robin Right. His publications include works on basic income, revolution in Brazil, and the possibility of a left-libertarian theology.

Join us for post-talk drinks at the Kings Arms from 7pm onwards.

Acclaimed mathematician Marcus du Sautoy gives the second of the Weinrebe Lecture Series, on the theme of ‘Variations on Biography’, hosted by the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing.

Cognitive enhancement technologies raised hope in boosting healthy brain functioning, increasing mental capacity, speed, and creativity, through use of electrical and magnetic currents. How do these technologies work? How is the brain affected? And what are the ethical and societal implications of their use? Professor Roi Cohen Kadosh, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, and Dr Hannah Maslen, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Ethics at the University of Oxford, will examine what happens when we combine mind and machine.