Sincere Thanks to Our Latest Alumni!
Amanda Shankland
Dr. Shankland has been a postdoctoral fellow with the CRTG team for the past two years. She has led research focused on community resilience and governance challenges in the Great Lakes, Lake Ontario and Toronto region bringing her expertise in community-based research, climate and water governance. She has helped Dr. Carolyn Johns with coordinating our diverse team on a wide range of projects and co-authored several publications stemming from our research.
Shankland, A. and C.Johns, 2026, “Review of Climate Change, Water Change and Governance Challenges in the Lake Ontario Canada Region” Environmental Reviews, Vol 34, online, open access.
Shankland, A. C.Johns, F.Davis, J.Baird and K.Chan 2026. “Community-Based Participatory Research and Indigenous Knowledge: A Pathway to Climate-Resilient and Transformative Water Governance”, Water Alternatives (forthcoming).
Amanda Shankland, Carolyn Johns, and Julia Baird, ‘Empathy, Equity, and Justice: Resilient and inclusive water governance in climate-impacted communities’, Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability (revise and resubmit).
Shankland, A. and C.Johns “Building Resilience Pathways: Indigenous and Community Perspectives on Climate Change and Water Governance in the City of Toronto”, submitted to Journal of Water and Climate Change.
Chan, K., A. Shankland, T. Kennedy and C.Johns “Centering Indigenous Knowledge in Climate Change and Water Resilience Approaches in the Toronto Region”, in preparation for International Indigenous Policy Journal.
Vianey Rueda, Amanda Shankland, Rachel Hoops, Kelly Fran Davis, and Andrew Gronewold, ‘Rethinking Knowledge, Data and Decision-Making in Transboundary Water Governance Under Uncertainty’, paper in preparation for target journal.
Over the past few months Amanda helped coordinate our international workshop focused on climate change and water governance challenges in May 2026, worked on scholarly articles and publications, and participated in the International Joint Commission’s Social Dimension workshop. Amanda recently started a new Limited Term Faculty position in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University. Amanda is leaving her role as postdoctoral fellow but will continue to work with members of the team on several publications. Her leadership and contributions to CRTG will be missed and we wish her all the best in her future academic career.
Yena Bassone-Quashie
Dr. Bassone-Quashie has been an integral part of our CRTG team since the project’s inception. She completed the comprehensive literature review on climate vulnerability, resilience and uncertainty for our team, helped develop our baseline research indicators and adapted Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC+), conducted baseline research focused the City of Toronto including a focus on water, Indigenous engagement, and city policies which was published in 2025:
Bassone-Quashie, Y. and C. Johns 2025. ‘The State of Climate Resilience and Water Governance in the City of Toronto: Advancing Adaptation at the Climate–Water Interface Through Baseline Assessment Research’, Climate Resilience and Sustainability, 4(2), 1-26.
In the past several months she has been focused on completing her dissertation on Climate Change and Climate Uncertainty in Municipal Stormwater Management Infrastructure Planning, Policy and Practice: Insights from Municipal Case Studies in Ontario Canada, which she successfully defended in August.
Dr. Bassone-Quashie will be starting a position as a Post Doctoral Scholar in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Waterloo in October. Her work will focus on increasing climate resilience and embedding climate uncertainty considerations in flood risk management at multiple geographic and spatial scales – from the watershed to the property-level scale. Her postdoctoral work will further develop and apply concepts from her PhD research on climate uncertainty, adaptive policy pathways, and infrastructure planning for stormwater management infrastructure – building on the research she completed on climate-water resilience as part of the Global Center for Transboundary Waters CRTG team.