Auditorium A1B Maison de la paix, Geneva Amid the string of powerful hurricanes that have decimated the Caribbean and the Southern US and more than 4 thousand fires immolating the American west, what does US environmental policy look like at this moment other than the ante chamber to catastrophe? This lunch briefing will cover three central areas: climate change, fire policy, and EPA strategy. Susanna Hecht will briefly outline how the resistance to the attack on environmental institutions and the underlying science is being countered in various forms of legal, political and popular forms of practices from C40 (global cities and their responses) to localities rethinking disaster response. Susanna Hecht‘s research focuses on the intersections of economies, cultures and land use, and the socio-environmental effects of these processes, an approach known as political ecology. She is Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. She has worked with the governments of Brazil, El Salvador, Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia and for European and US development agencies such as GTZ, as well as The World Bank and InterAmerican Development Bank, and many non-government organizations. For registration, please visit this link