Who is Cabot Institute? Professor Guy Howard

In conversation with Professor Guy Howard, Director of the Cabot Institute

Professor Guy Howard in the field

What is your role at Cabot Institute?

I am the Director of the Institute, providing overall strategic direction for the Institute, developing our external and internal partnerships, raising funds, and overseeing the Cabot team.

How long have you been part of Cabot?

An active member since joining the University of Bristol in 2019, taking part as a researcher. I was appointed Associate Director International in January 2021 and then became Interim Director in June and now Director from October.

What is your background?

I have a degree in Geology, a postgraduate diploma in soil and water engineering and a PhD on public health oversight of water supplies. I spent 12 years in Surrey and then Loughborough Universities at the start of my career, and then spent nearly 16 years working for the UK Department for International Development as a Climate & Environment Advisor, Infrastructure Advisor, and Policy Manager. I returned to academia as the Global Research Chair in Environmental and Infrastructure Resilience in the School of Civil Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at Bristol.

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

We have two: climate change, its impacts, and the loss of biodiversity. These are the defining challenges of the 21^st century.

What is your favourite part of your job?

Working with the Cabot community to develop new proposals for research and impact and working with the fabulous Cabot team.

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

I want Cabot to establish itself as a global leader on inter-disciplinary environmental research with a healthy portfolio of large and small research grants, a growing and active community, and strong partnerships with local, national, and global institutions. I am particularly excited about developing a new programme of work on climate change and heath over the next 3 years.

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

Cabot’s a great example of how brining people together from different backgrounds and disciplines can lead to exciting new insights and projects – join us if you haven’t already!

Find out more about Guy 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...

Your Waste of Time: Art-Based Geographical Practices and the Environment

This blog post thinks through the themes of aesthetic interventions, sensing time and engendering response-ability using artistic responses to climate change. Here, these themes are drawn from one piece of art, Your Waste of Time, by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. This performative showcasing of glacial ice establishes interactions and relations between human bodies and icy materialities- but what is at stake here and what potentialities could be created through artistic practices? These are questions that have arisen through my current dissertation, where I hope to explore artistic responses to environmental degradation through the materialities of ice and plastic. For the piece Your Waste of Time, Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson transported several large blocks of ice from Vatnajökull, the largest and oldest glacier in Iceland, to the Berlin gallery Neugerriemschneider (Eliasson, 2006). This glacier is almost incomprehensibly ancient, with some parts dating fro...

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