Eric Galbraith

Title: 
Full Professor 
Contact Information
Email address: 
eric.galbraith [at] mcgill.ca
Areas of expertise: 

Climate change, Human-earth modelling, Ecology and biogeochemistry 

Group: 
Faculty
Current research: 

Humans are an integral part of the Earth system, and are dramatically modifying both the planetary surface and the organisms that live upon it. Yet, research on humans is typically carried out in isolation from research on the Earth system, making it hard to understand how to simultaneously achieve both human and non-human goals. The Integrated Earth System Dynamics laboratory targets this disciplinary divide, studying global humanity and its intimate coupling with the non-human Earth as a unified system. We borrow tools from biogeochemistry, theoretical ecology and complexity science, and join them with insights from anthropology, sociology, economics and medicine, in the hope of better figuring out what the heck is going on.

Selected publications: 

Galbraith, E. D., Carozza, D. A., & Bianchi, D. (2017). A coupled human-Earth model perspective on long-term trends in the global marine fishery. Nature communications8(1), 1-7.

Barrington-Leigh, C., & Galbraith, E. (2019). Feasible future global scenarios for human life evaluations. Nature communications10(1), 1-8.

Galbraith, Eric D. Earth system economics: a biophysical approach to the human component of the Earth system. Earth System Dynamics 12, no. 2 (2021): 671-687.

Zhu, Dan, Eric D. Galbraith, Victoria Reyes-García, and Philippe Ciais. Global hunter-gatherer population densities constrained by influence of seasonality on diet composition. Nature ecology & evolution 5, no. 11 (2021): 1536-1545.

Hatton, I. A., Heneghan, R. F, Bar-On, Y. M. and Galbraith, E. D. (2021). The global ocean size spectrum from bacteria to whales. Science Advances 7(46).

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