In the run up to COP26, Geoff was invited to join a ‘Climate Change Expert Panel’ hosted by the International Interdisciplinary Environmental Association and the Laboratorio Nacional de Ciencias de la Sostenibilidad-IE at UNAM in Mexico, the largest university in Latin America. The Chair was Dr. Paola M. Garcia-Meneses, a member of the Climate Change and Sustainable Cities Working Committees of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN).
The panel also included Dr. Ana Cecilia Conde Álvarez, General Coordinator of Adaptation to Climate Change of the National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change (INECC) and part of the Mexican delegation to negotiate the Paris Agreement. She is also the Lead Author of the Sixth IPCC Report on “Decision-making options for managing risk”. And Professor Iain Stewart, the El Hassan bin Talal Research Chair in Sustainability at the Royal Scientific Society (Amman, Jordan), Visiting Professor in Environmental Studies at Ashoka University, India, and Professor of Geoscience Communication at the University of Plymouth.
The panel came from a range of disciplines; it was a chance for Geoff to discuss the psychological barriers to climate change, and highlight the great gap between expressed values and actual sustainable behaviour in most people’s lives. We could all do more and demand more from our politicians. So why aren’t we? Geoff outlined the psychology behind this. The discussion, he reported, was excellent.
Geoff did an interview on the 29th October with Business Daily on the BBC World Service on the psychology of trophy hunting based on his book ‘Trophy Hunting: A Psychological Perspective’. The programme also involved interviews with the famous conservationist Richard Leakey and a representative of the Born Free Foundation.