The COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, mass migration and other shocks have disrupted organizations across the globe. SFU Beedie School of Business professor June Francis says businesses can improve their resiliency by drawing upon the diverse range of capitals found in the wider community.

Her paper, Resources for business resilience in a COVID-19 world: A community-centric approach, co-authored with Beedie alumnus and IE Business School professor Stephanie Beninger, outlines how businesses can use the novel and actionable integrated capital framework to survive—and to thrive.

School of Interactive Arts and Technology Professor Carman Neustaedter and collaborators Brennan Jones and Anthony Tang used an interdisciplinary approach to create RescueCASTR – new technology that uses wearable cameras to help search and rescue personal communicate in the backcountry. 

Health Sciences Professor Charlotte Waddell and her research team at SFU’s Children's Health Policy Centre found that in many affluent countries—Canada included—less than half of children with mental health disorders receive any services for these conditions. She recommends an urgent call to action to support children’s mental wellbeing.

The study, Prevalence of childhood mental disorders in high-income countries: a systematic review and meta-analysis to inform policymaking, was published in Evidence-Based Mental Health.

Research from SFU Economics professor Fernando Aragón suggests that policies to foster small-scale agriculture in the Global South may be counterproductive. Facilitating land transactions and eliminating distortionary policies could help farmers thrive.

His article, Are small farms really more productive than large farms? co-authored with Diego Restuccia (University of Toronto) and Juan Pablo Rud (Royal Holloway, University of London) was published in Food Policy.

Anne Salomon is a leading marine ecologist and professor with Simon Fraser University’s School of Resource and Environmental Management. Her research on sea otters points to the value of using traditional Indigenous knowledge to inform how coastal ecosystems are managed today.

Salomon's study, Archaeological and Contemporary Evidence Indicates Low Sea Otter Prevalence on the Pacific Northwest Coast During the Late Holocene, with SFU REM graduate and first author Erin Slade and University of Victoria Professor Iain McKechnie was supported by the Heiltsuk, Wuikinuxv and Tseshaht First Nations, and has been widely reported in the media.

The Mount Meager (Qw’elqw’elústen) Volcanic Complex near Pemberton, British Columbia, last erupted over 2400 years ago—but it’s still an active volcano, and climate change is making it increasingly unstable.

SFU Earth Sciences Professor and Chair Glyn Williams-Jones and his collaborators have made numerous trips to Mount Meager to study these changes and assess the potential hazards of an active volcano close to home. He is one of many SFU researchers working with partners on community-centred climate innovation.

September brings the start of the new school year, but it is also a time to pause and commemorate the thousands of children that did not come home from Canadian residential schools, while acknowledging the harms to all.      

SFU Indigenous Studies Professor Eldon Yellowhorn is the principal investigator of the Brandon Indian Residential School Cemeteries Project. The project seeks to identify and acknowledge the children buried at the site, and connect them back with family and communities.

ACT – the Action on Climate Team at SFU works with organizations to embed low carbon resilience approaches and nature-based solutions into their planning and operations. They have published a series of resources and toolkits to help businesses and communities take meaningful and achievable climate action.

We spoke with executive director Alison Shaw about ACT's innovative work to create more sustainable cities and communities.

Adolescence is a critical time of emotional, intellectual and personal development. As young people begin dating, situations arise that can cause stress and conflict. SFU Criminology Professor Jennifer Wong and PhD student Chelsey Lee reviewed dozens of studies on teen violence prevention programs to analyze their effectiveness. 
Their article, Examining the effects of teen dating violence prevention programs: a systematic review and meta-analysis, discusses what's working—and what’s not—when it comes to preventing teen dating violence.

Kirsten Zickfeld is a Simon Fraser University Distinguished Professor of climate science in the Department of Geography and director of the SFU Climate Research Lab. Her research focuses on the long-term effects of human activities on climate. She recently co-led a study that determined nature-based solutions to capture carbon—such as reforestation—could help achieve Paris Agreement climate goals, but only if paired with other aggressive carbon reduction strategies. 

For the study, Temporary nature-based carbon removal can lower peak warming in a well-below 2 °C scenario, recently published in Nature Communications, Zickfeld and SFU researchers worked with collaborators from Concordia University and Microsoft.