Delegation Members

University of Maine COP23 Delegation

Dr. Cindy Isenhour
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Climate Change

As an ecological and economic anthropologist I am particularly interested in environmental risk perception, economic decision-making and cooperation for environmental governance.  Much of my recent work has focused on policies, institutions and everyday practices designed to encourage more “sustainable consumption” in highly affluent urban contexts. This work builds on a growing international recognition that successful and just governance of the global commons will require significant reductions in resource use and emissions in the so-called “developed” world.  Drawing on work in institutional and ecological economics my work compliments anthropological insights into ecological cooperation, institution building and adaptation in rural and subsistence-based economies with research on urban sustainability policy and practice. I have conducted field work in the US, Central America, China, and Scandinavia and am currently working on a new project designed to explore the policy and environmental justice implications of consumption-based emissions accounting for Chinese producers and Swedish consumers.

Dr. Aaron Strong
Assistant Professor of Marine Policy

Broadly, I am interested in understanding the governance of ecosystem services — the market and non-market values that human beings derive from functioning ecosystems. My research is particularly focused on understanding the development of emergent environmental governance institutions and approaches for managing problems of carbon and nitrogen cycling in coastal ecosystems: climate change, ocean acidification, and problems of water quality and pollution. In my work, I focus across scales, studying international organizational approaches, federal and state agency-practices, and local community sustainability initiatives. Currently, I have projects focused on (1) state-level ocean acidification management in Maine, (2) coastal blue carbon accounting and institutional incorporation into conservation practice, (3) perceptions, indicators and definitions of sustainability in coastal algal (seaweed) harvesting and aquaculture, (4) the use of the coastal ecosystem services framework in federal decision-making, and (5) the institutional interaction of international ocean governance and global climate change policy regimes. I am also interested in the study of effective sustainability pedagogy and curriculum development

Trained in an interdisciplinary manner, my research adopts a mixed methods approach, combining quantitative, indicator-based policy analysis that relies heavily on biogeochemical monitoring data, with qualitative in-depth semi-structured interview-based data collection and participant observation approaches in addressing questions at the nexus of sustainability science and marine policy.  I firmly believe in a sustainability science approach to studying environmental problems.

 Dr. Strong has attended and conducted research at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, COP16 in Cancun in 2010, and at COP21 in Paris in 2015.

Anna McGinn
Graduate Student, Climate Change Institute and School for Policy and International Affairs

I am a second year master's student pursuing a dual degree in Climate and Quaternary Studies with the Climate Change Institute and in Global Policy with the School for Policy and International Affairs. My research interests include climate change adaptation governance and interactions of international climate governance and ocean governance regimes. My thesis research focuses on climate change adaptation at difference governance level with a particular focus on the UNFCCC processes and a case study in Nicaragua. My work is supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. I am also an intern for USAID's Climate Risk Management department within the Global Climate Change Initiative.

I have attended and conducted research at COP17 in Durban, South Africa in 2011; at COP21 in Paris in 2015; and at COP22 in Marrakech, Morocco in 2016. I am looking forward to following adaptation funding negotiations at COP23 in Bonn.

Will Kochtitzky
Graduate Student, Climate Change Institute and School of Earth and Climate Sciences


I am a US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Maine where I am pursuing a masters degree with the School of Earth and Climate Science. I grew up in Nashville, TN before attending Dickinson College in Pennsylvania where I earned a B.S. in Earth Sciences. I am interested in glaciers around the world and work with remotely sensed and in situ data to answer questions about glacier dynamics and mass balance. My thesis work is focused on surging glacier dynamics in the St. Elias Mountains of Western Canada and Alaska.

 I have attended and conducted research at COP20 in Lima, Peru. At COP23, I will be following conversations on the cryosphere, and building a scientist's guide to the COP for UMaine physical scientists. 

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