I recently had the honour of interviewing Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, who completed his six-year term as the President of the European Research Council (ERC) at the end of 2019. As an award-winning mathematician, he has been a fellow of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique for most of his career. Bourguignon held a Professor position at École Polytechnique (1986-2012) and served ...[Read More]
GeoPolicy: My experience with the EGU’s science-policy pairing scheme
“Thanks for coming, but no time for celebratory drinks,” I told my colleagues. I arrived in Brussels right after defending my doctoral thesis to brief the Finnish Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Miapetra Kumpula-Natri and her team about the impact of sea-level rise and climate change on the coastal communities of the Baltic Sea. Climate science? Baltic Sea? EU Parliament? I was soon bombar ...[Read More]
GeoPolicy: Shaping EU Missions – bridging the gap between geoscience and policy
This month’s GeoPolicy blog post is a Q&A about the EGU’s second annual science-policy event, Shaping EU Missions: bridging the gap between geoscience and policy which was hosted in Brussels on October 17 2019. The EGU has an annual event outside of the General Assembly?? Yes! Except this one is much smaller with about 70 participants and relatively new (only starting in 2018). Th ...[Read More]
GeoPolicy: What really drives political decision-making?
On July 17 2019, the EU Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) published a report highlighting how thinking is challenged by today’s information environment and the role of evidence-informed policymaking in a well-functioning democracy. Titled Understanding our political nature, the report was produced with the assistance of 60 international experts in the humanities, behavioural and socia ...[Read More]