Balk and Jones: Implications for Climate Research

Dr. Balk is Professor of Public Affairs in the School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, Professor in the Public Health, Economics, and Sociology Ph.D. Programs at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Associate Director of the CUNY Institute of Demographic Research. She is also a 2016Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Her research is on urban demography in low- and middle-income countries. She combines demographic and spatial frameworks to examine urbanization and related demographic behaviors with respect to environmental factors, in particular climate change. She has several active research projects, funded by the NSF, AXA Research Fund, and NASA, with collaborators at the Population Council, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Colorado, Boulder and the Jet Propulsion Lab. These projects examine Multi-Scale Processes Affecting Spatial Population Distributions; City Growth, Urbanization and Climate-Related Risks in the 21st Century; and demographic change and the built environment in mega cities of Asia. Using a spatial demographic lens, she also studies poverty, and demographic and health outcomes and change in developing countries.

Bryan Jones is currently a NSF Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) Fellow at the City University of New York Institute for Demographic Research (CIDR). His current work explores the relationship between spatial population dynamics, urbanization, and climate change vulnerability. At CIDR, he is the principal investigator in three-year research initiative entitled “developing new models to understand human vulnerability to climate-related hazards at multiple scales.” This project explores the multi-scale drivers of spatial population change as part of an ongoing effort to model spatially explicit, alternative population and urbanization futures consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario framework. Concurrent projections of climate change and variability are incorporated, facilitating the spatially explicit assessment of physical and socioeconomic vulnerability to climate-related hazards.

Bryan holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and M.A. in Geography from the University of Connecticut. His research interests include spatial statistics/GIS, population dynamics and migration, rural development, and risk/vulnerability assessment. In the past he has worked on methods for assessing the socioeconomic and demographic impacts of large-scale rural development projects, as well as indirect methods for estimating age-specific migration patterns, particularly for countries in which no migration data are collected.