Professor Patrick Regan has been appointed the Associate Director of the University of Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative (ND-ECI) for ND-GAIN.
In this new role, Regan will lead academic scholarship around ND-GAIN by amplifying faculty engagement in climate adaptation, identifying funding opportunities to enhance the University’s climate research capacity, directing scholarly output and products, as well as other responsibilities to promote the shared goals of ND-ECI and ND-GAIN.
“The idea that human social adaptation reflects a potential intervention between the scarcities driven by climate change and the outcomes of those climate stressors provides new areas in which the social and the physical sciences interact to influence various outcomes from armed conflict to crop yields,” said Regan. “Working with ND-GAIN provides an opportunity to explore new ideas and help facilitate interactions across disciplines and colleges.”
Regan is a Professor of Political Science and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His primary research has focused on the role of external actors in managing armed conflict. He studies how interventions shape conflict, paying particular attention to the interaction between military interventions and diplomatic mediation in civil wars. Regan is also exploring the conditions under which water scarcity driven by climate changes influences the likelihood of observing armed conflict. A key part of this research involves the role of social adaptation to the climate stressors.
He is the author of four books, The Politics of Global Climate Change (Paradigm, 2014), Sixteen Million One: Understanding Civil War (Paradigm, 2010), Civil Wars and Foreign Powers (Michigan, 2000), and Organizing Societies for War (Praeger, 1994).
Regan was most recently (fall 2015) a visiting scholar at China’s Sichuan University’s Center on Ecology, Environment and Sustainability and a Fulbright research fellow at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, Norway. He was also the 2013 president of the Peace Science Society.
“We are thrilled to have Pat join ECI leadership through his new role at ND-GAIN and welcome him aboard,” said Jennifer Tank, ECI director. “It’s an exciting time as Pat’s research expertise brings added breadth to our scholarship around climate change.”
Originally published by at environmentalchange.nd.edu on February 18, 2016.