Keynote Speakers

Prof. Dr. Simon Redfern

Title: Climate Transformation: Understanding, Mitigating, and Adapting

Abstract:
The Climate Transformation Programme, at NTU Singapore, is one of the most recent scientific responses to the challenges of climate change. A seven-year multi-disciplinary and multi-million dollar project, it sets out to understand the impacts of and propose potential responses to the existential threats associated with climate change. Science has been at the forefront of highlighting these threats and quantifying predictions of future change, but must step beyond simple diagnosis of the problems to proposals for their solutions. Climate health will depend upon successful prescriptions of adaptations and mitigations. These include the use of nature based solutions, of negative emissions technologies, and a switch to new forms of energy. I will outline some of the activities we are undertaking as part of the Climate Transformation Programme, as well as additional actions that may help secure a more sustainable future for all.

Biography:
Simon Redfern is President’s Chair in Earth Sciences in the Asian School of the Environment, and Dean of the College of Science, NTU Singapore. He completed his PhD in 1989 at the University of Cambridge, Department of Earth Sciences, and upon graduating with his PhD he was appointed at the University of Manchester as Lecturer in Geochemical Spectroscopy joint between Geology and Chemistry. Subsequently. In 1994, he returned to Cambridge as a Lecturer in the Department of Earth Sciences, and was then promoted to Reader and then Professor. In 2016 he became Head of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He left Cambridge in 2019 to move to NTU and take up the post of President’s Chair in Earth Sciences, alongside the role of Dean of the College of Science. Professor Redfern's work explores how minerals control and reflect Earth processes and he has worked in collaboration with a wide variety of Earth and environmental scientists, from climate scientists to volcanologists to palaeontologist to seismologists and even exoplanetary “geo”scientists. In all cases he is interested in how insights into nanometre scale features provide understanding of global processes. His work has extended to using insights from nature to develop new materials in the context of materials design and engineering.