Nathan Debortoli
Climate Adaptation and Environment Specialist
Key skills: climate change vulnerability assessments, adaptation planning, GIS and remote sensing, complex indices modeling, indicators conception and integration, climate change perception analysis, system network analysis, environmental and sustainability policy analysis, natural hazards, extreme weather events and disaster research.
Nathan’s work focuses on finding solutions to integrate climate, environment, socioeconomic and institutional data in diverse scales and regions. He has designed unique methods to implement indices to assess climate change vulnerability of drought, flash floods and landslides in tropical regions and airport and port infrastructure in the Arctic. Nathan’s approach uses complex data sets, with holistic and adaptable products that are easy to communicate to different audiences, such as decision and policymakers. His portfolio also includes the use of remote sensing, GIS algebra, mapping and R-Platform coding tools with application in climate extreme and climate change scenarios analysis, land use and forestry, watershed management, indicator system network analysis and text decoding.
As a Research Associate and Postdoctoral researcher at McGill University Climate Change and Adaptation Research Group, Nathan developed new tools and techniques to help policy and decision makers detect which regions and communities in Inuit Nunangat are more vulnerable to climate change. As a consultant for Transport Canada, Nathan developed an integrated index to measure and understand how present and future vulnerability to climate change may affect ports and airports infrastructure in the North.
Nathan holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the COSTEL Geomatics lab at the Universite Rennes II in France and a Ph.D. in Sustainable Development from the Centre for Sustainable Development at Universidade de Brasilia in Brazil. He also holds a master’s degree in Sustainable Development from the Universidade de Brasilia. During his Ph.D., Nathan studied the impacts of deforestation on rainfall patterns in the Brazilian Amazon and developed land use models, indicators and governance scenarios partnering with the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) from France and the European Union (EU).