UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Nicolas Choquette-Levy, assistant professor of climate risk and decision-making in the Department of Geosciences at Penn State, will give the talk “Haunted by hazards: Investigating the "long shadow" of natural disturbances through coupled human-biophysical responses,” at 2 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 30, in 117 Earth and Engineering Sciences Building on the University Park campus. The talk will also be available via Zoom.
The event is part of a fall seminar series hosted by TRAnscendIng Natural hazards forecasting (TRAIN). The talk is free and open to the public.
Natural hazards such as droughts, floods and wildfires can have consequences that extend far beyond the initial disturbance, impacting both the natural landscape and the human community.
“In addition to altering biophysical processes — including vegetation, hydrology and soils — hazards can reshape human decisions and societal processes, such as land use and migration, which can persist from seasons to decades after the initial disturbance,” Choquette-Levy said. “Understanding the full impacts of natural hazards therefore requires looking beyond the disturbance itself to the longer-term interactions between people and landscapes.”
Choquette-Levy will present studies connecting human response to sustained climate impacts. He will then discuss an upcoming project to investigate how these impacts and responses change over time.
“I have drawn on empirical and agent-based modeling to examine societal responses to hazards in Nepal and Senegal, highlighting how human responses can both mediate and amplify the longer-term consequences of environmental disturbances,” Choquette-Levy said. “The next project develops a coupled human–biophysical framework to investigate how wildfire impacts and societal responses co-evolve across seasonal to decadal timescales.”
Choquette-Levy is the principal investigator of the Climate Adaptation Models for Policy Lab. His research uses surveys and models to study how farmers adapt to climate risks, with projects in Nepal, Senegal and Brazil. Originally from Montreal, Canada, Choquette-Levy earned bachelor’s degrees in biomedical engineering and international relations from the University of Southern California, a master’s degree in energy and environmental systems from the University of Calgary, and a doctorate in science, technology and environmental policy from Princeton University. He also has experience analyzing energy policy at the Canadian Consulate in San Francisco, managing sustainability projects in Calgary and researching environmental issues at the World Bank in Washington, D.C.
About TRAIN
TRAIN is an initiative through the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI) that aims to transform complex geophysical and atmospheric data and bridge the gap between raw information and community resilience. TRAIN aims to build the community at Penn State to become nationally recognized for research innovation to respond proactively to funding opportunities and coordinate natural hazard responses.