Who is Cabot Institute? Angus Morrice

Angus Morrice

In conversation with Angus Morrice, Administrator and PA to the Director at the Cabot Institute

What is your role at Cabot Institute?

I am the Administrator and PA to the Director of the Cabot Institute for the Environment. I work primarily with the core Cabot Team and our academics who are in leadership positions to keep the Institute running. I also wok with members of the academic and non-academic community at the University to organize events, arrange and provide support and I operate as a first port of call for incoming enquiries into the institute.

How long have you been part of Cabot?

I joined Cabot near the beginning of 2019, so I’ve been here for over two years now.

What is your background?

I studied Geography at the University of Bristol. This of course meant that the works of the Institute and many of its members were familiar and the job seemed to be a good fit for my interests and skills. I have almost a decade’s experience working in the arts in various capacities and the skills developed as well as the love and respect I have for the arts have been invaluable. The grounding gained through my degree and work in the arts has allowed me to wholly engage with the spirit of deep interdisciplinarity and cooperation that runs through the core of the Institute.

Why did you want to join the team?

Even from a young age the urgency of what is now called the climate emergency was glaringly apparent to me, it was one of the things that made me want to study Geography at University and made me determined to work in the environmental sector after graduating. Unfortunately, the state of jobs for graduates in the UK being what it was when I graduated in 2018 (a state that has only continued to decline) I was unable to find any jobs in the environmental sector upon graduating. I continued looking and the job at the Cabot Institute came up and it was a perfect fit for my skills interests and values.

What do you think is the biggest environmental challenge facing us today?

The entrenched, deliberate, and perpetuated inequality of wealth, power, and resources.

What is your favorite part of your job?

I most enjoy working with people to deliver public events.

What are you most looking forward to over the next 10 years of Cabot?

I look forward to the Institute growing and diversifying, coming to a richer place of interdisciplinarity and cooperation and acting as an exemplar of what can be achieved through open, creative, and inclusive interdisciplinary collaboration when approached with humility, curiosity, and passion.

Anything else about who Cabot is and what you do that you would like to add?

Cabot is its membership, and its membership is diverse and passionate.

Cabot as a community might best be thought of as a rich woodland, growing, changing, living, interconnected, and mutually supporting. The whole is hard to see sometimes, and it might be impossible to truly quantify all its parts, actions, outputs, and effects but that makes it neither less valuable nor less of a superb model for the work that is so urgently needed.

Find out more about Angus here.

Converting probabilities between time-intervals

This is the first in an irregular sequence of snippets about some of the slightly more technical aspects of uncertainty and risk assessment. If you have a slightly more technical question, then please email me and I will try to answer it with a snippet. Suppose that an event has a probability of 0.015 (or 1.5%) of happening at least once in the next five years. Then the probability of the event happening at least once in the next year is 0.015 / 5 = 0.003 (or 0.3%), and the probability of it happening at least once in the next 20 years is 0.015 * 4 = 0.06 (or 6%). Here is the rule for scaling probabilities to different time intervals: if both probabilities (the original one and the new one) are no larger than 0.1 (or 10%), then simply multiply the original probability by the ratio of the new time-interval to the original time-interval, to find the new probability. This rule is an approximation which breaks down if either of the probabilities is greater than 0.1. For exa...

1-in-200 year events

You often read or hear references to the ‘1-in-200 year event’, or ‘200-year event’, or ‘event with a return period of 200 years’. Other popular horizons are 1-in-30 years and 1-in-10,000 years. This term applies to hazards which can occur over a range of magnitudes, like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, space weather, and various hydro-meteorological hazards like floods, storms, hot or cold spells, and droughts. ‘1-in-200 years’ refers to a particular magnitude. In floods this might be represented as a contour on a map, showing an area that is inundated. If this contour is labelled as ‘1-in-200 years’ this means that the current rate of floods at least as large as this is 1/200 /yr, or 0.005 /yr. So if your house is inside the contour, there is currently a 0.005 (0.5%) chance of being flooded in the next year, and a 0.025 (2.5%) chance of being flooded in the next five years. The general definition is this: ‘1-in-200 year magnitude is x’ = ‘the current rate for eve...

Coconuts and climate change

Before pursuing an MSc in Climate Change Science and Policy at the University of Bristol, I completed my undergraduate studies in Environmental Science at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. During my final year I carried out a research project that explored the impact of extreme weather events on coconut productivity across the three climatic zones of Sri Lanka. A few months ago, I managed to get a paper published and I thought it would be a good idea to share my findings on this platform. Climate change and crop productivity There has been a growing concern about the impact of extreme weather events on crop production across the globe, Sri Lanka being no exception. Coconut is becoming a rare commodity in the country, due to several reasons including the changing climate. The price hike in coconuts over the last few years is a good indication of how climate change is affecting coconut productivity across the country. Most coconut trees are no longer bearing fruits and ...

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