Sarah Burch

Dr. Sarah Burch holds a Canada Research Chair in Sustainability Governance and Innovation, and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo, Canada. She is an expert in transformative responses to climate change at the community scale, innovative strategies for making progress on sustainability, and the unique contributions that small businesses can make to this solving this complex challenge. She leads the international partnership-based research project TRANSFORM: Accelerating sustainability entrepreneurship experiments in local spaces, and is the Director of the Sustainability Policy Research on Urban Transformations (SPROUT) Lab.

Dr. Burch holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford. She is currently a Lead Author of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007). She was elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars in 2017 and was named one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40^TM in 2018. Her most recent book is entitled ‘Understanding Climate Change: Science, Policy and Practice,’ and she has taught the first Massive Open Online Course on climate change, which reached thousands over students in over 130 countries.