Jim A. Perry

Jim Perry

Contact

Phone: 612-625-4717
E-mail: [email protected]

Education

Ph.D., Idaho State University

Fields of Interest

  • Science-policy linkage in conservation and natural resource management
  • Climate change vulnerability assessment and adaptation in protected areas, especially World Heritage Sites

Research

My current research focuses on the climate change, the ways it interfaces with the concept of heritage and ways society adapts to climate change. I built a global “hot spots” model that identifies variables that control vulnerability to climate change among the 208 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, applies that model to all sites and identifies those most at risk. I have followed that work in collaboration with UNESCO to develop an adaptation manual that guides World Heritage or other protected area managers in understanding the risks climate change poses to their site, and guides them toward adaptation strategies. Some of those strategies will involve an ecosystem based management approach to the landscape containing the World Heritage site or protected area. Supporting that, I have worked with UNEP for the last several years to develop a global training program for ecosystem management. UNEP Nairobi published that work in mid-2012 and it will now enter a Train-The-Trainers phase. All of that work has been done in the context of greater (i.e., spatially larger) goals that advance society’s ability to recognize and adapt to new climate regimes. In support of that, I collaborate with UNEP in a multi-year, 17-country project to assess and adapt to climate change vulnerability at a range of temporal and spatial scales. Our analysis of Lessons Learned in that effort will be published in late 2012 and officially launched at the Conference of the Parties in Doha in 2012. My work with the Chironomid team provides an on-the-ground application of those threads. In that context, we examine spring-fed, coldwater systems, asking which are most vulnerable to climate changes, and what adaptive strategies might reduce what society perceives to be negative impacts of those changes.

Recent Publications

  • Krider, L, JA Magner, JA Perry, B Vondracek & L Ferrington In Press Air – water temperature relationships in the trout streams of southeastern Minnesota’s carbonate – sandstone landscape. Journal of the American Water Resources Association.
  • Perry, JA et al. 2012 Ecosystem management: concept to local scale implementation. A global training program. Participant Manual & Facilitator Manual. Published by UNEP Nairobi
  • Perry, JA 2012 Predicting, and responding to climate change impacts on World Heritage forests. Invited paper in Toolkit for assessing vulnerability of natural World Heritage Sites to climate change, UNESCO Paris.
  • Perry, JA 2011 World Heritage Hot Spots: A global model identifies the 16 natural resource properties on the World Heritage list most at risk from climate change. International Journal of Heritage Studies. 17: 426-441
  • Perry JA & A Jenks 2011 The secret garden: Geocaching links the campus to the classroom. Invited paper for Leal, W (ed.). World trends on education for sustainable development Series: Environmental Education, Communication and Sustainability Vol. 32
  • Rusch, H & JA Perry 2011 Dengue and the landscape: A Threat to Public Health National Center for Case Studies in Teaching. http://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/collection/detail.asp?case_id=596&id=596
  • Perry, JA, L Paas, L Pintér, ME Arreola, E Santer, N Sharma and J Bellali. 2010. Promoting e-governance through capacity development for the global environment: UNEP’s training strategy in Integrated Environmental Assessment (IEA) In Rahman, H (ed.) Cases on Adoption, Diffusion and Evaluation of Global E-Governance Systems: Impact at the Grass Roots IGI Global.