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Jim Perry

H.T. Morse Distinguished Professor of Water Quality and Environmental Management
Phone: 612-625-4717
E-mail: jperry@umn.edu
Ph.D., Idaho State University

Fields of Interest

Climate change adaptation and resource management

Research

My current research focuses on climate change and the ways it interfaces with the concept and application of heritage. My work is both global and local; at the global scale, I used the 208 UNESCO World Heritage Sites to build a global "hot spots" model that identifies variables that control vulnerability to climate change, applies that model to all sites and identifies those most at risk (Perry 2011 IJHS). I continued 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 be fine scale (i.e., on-site) and some coarse scale (i.e., involving the surrounding landscape). To advance the latter, I have worked with many others to develop an ecosystem based management approach to a landscape, for example, one containing a World Heritage site or protected area. I worked with UNEP to develop a global training program for ecosystem management. That work was published by UNEP Nairobi and is now in 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 advancing that larger goal, I collaborated 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 was officially launched at the Conference of the Parties in Doha late in 2012.

Recent Publications

• Autere, K, JA Perry et al. 2012 Seeds of knowledge: contributing toclimate change solutions. UNEP Nairobi and Millennium Development Goals Foundation
• Perry, JA & C Falzon 2013 Clomate change adaptation: a toolkit for World Heritage site managers. UNESCO Paris
• Perry, JA et al. 2012 Ecosystem management: concept to local scale implementation. A global training program. UNEP Nairobi
• Perry, JA 2011 A global model identifies the 16 natural resource World Heritage Sites most at risk from climate change. International Journal of Heritage Studies. . 17: 417-442
• Perry, JA 2011 Predicting, and responding to climate change impacts on World Heritage forests. Invited paper in World Heritage Papers 30: 24-28, UNESCO Paris. In Press.
• Easter, KW & JA Perry (ed.) 2011 Water policy in Minnesota: Issues, incentives, actions. Resources for the Future Press
• Krider, LA, JA Magner, JA Perry, B Vondracek & LC Ferrington Jr 2013 Air - water temperature relationships in the trout streams of southeastern Minnesota’s carbonate - sandstone landscape Journal of trhe American Water Resources Association IN PRESS
• 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 IN PRESS
• Rusch, H & JA Perry 2011 Dengue and the landscape : A Threat to Public Health National Center for Case Studies in Teaching.
• 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.
• Schram, E and J Perry. 2010. University of Minnesota water-based nitrogen budget. IN Leal Filho, W (ed). 2010. Universities and climate change: introducing climate change at university programmes. Springer Verlag, Chapter 5.