Dr. Susan Preston

Susan Preston, Ph.D. is Manager of National Biodiversity Policy at Environment and Climate Change Canada.  Her research has focused on social-environmental values in Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadian communities. She advises on ecosystem services and social-environmental sciences, including serving for three years as an invited expert member of the Values Taskforce for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), through which she contributed to the guide on multiple values of nature and the Global Assessment.  She was the lead author of Canada’s federal, provincial, and territorial governments’ Ecosystem Services Toolkit: Completing and Using Ecosystem Service Assessment for Decision-Making. 

What is your role in the C1W project?

My primary role in C1W is to advise on the analysis of ecosystem services, and the science-policy interface for biodiversity, based on the biophysical science that informs the products of this amazing initiative.

What benefits do you think C1W will bring to Canada/Canadians?

Groundwater and surface water are fundamental to biodiversity and ecosystem processes. The knowledge that C1W brings can become invaluable in our efforts to better understand and measure the dynamics of many ecosystem processes and the ecosystem services that all Canadians benefit from. It can enhance policy and decision-making across Canada for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, nature-based solutions to climate change, and much more.