Brad Bass is an active educator in complex systems, founding and directing the University Research Experience with Complex Systems (URECS), which offers opportunities for undergraduate and secondary school students to develop virtual labs to explore complex systems. As the Associate Director for the Foundation of Student Science and Technology, Dr. Bass creates professional STEM opportunities for secondary school and undergraduate students. As an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto, Dr. Bass continues to create research opportunities for undergraduate students. All student research in complexity is conducted using Dr. Bass' agent-based software, COBWEB. Dr. Bass has been active for many years in green infrastructure research. His energy, urban heat island and biodiversity analyses were used to develop Toronto's Green Roof Bylaw. His most recent work has been in areas of non-market valuation and the behavioural change towards new innovations.
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is used to evaluate the benefits, primarily from reduced energy consu... more Life cycle assessment (LCA) is used to evaluate the benefits, primarily from reduced energy consumption, resulting from the addition of a green roof to an eight story residential building in Madrid. Building energy use is simulated and a bottom-up LCA is conducted assuming a 50 year building life. The key property of a green roof is its low solar absorptance, which causes lower surface temperature, thereby reducing the heat flux through the roof. Savings in annual energy use are just over 1%, but summer cooling load is reduced by over 6% and reductions in peak hour cooling load in the upper floors reach 25%. By replacing the common flat roof with a green roof, environmental impacts are reduced by between 1.0 and 5.3%. Similar reductions might be achieved by using a white roof with additional insulation for winter, but more substantial reductions are achieved if common use of green roofs leads to reductions in the urban heat island.
Indoor environmental health is now recognized as an important factor in preventing respiratory he... more Indoor environmental health is now recognized as an important factor in preventing respiratory health problems in the United States. It is also a concern in Canada due to the amount of time that Canadians spend indoors because of cold weather and the potential for increased time indoors during the summer if the climate warms. The negative health effects are often labeled as sick building syndrome, but diagnosing a building or its occupants as sick is complicated by the variety of symptoms, the presence of chronic versus acute symptoms and social and psychological (socio-psychological) factors that may reduce the effectiveness of an engineering solution. As a case study, the contribution of various factors to indoor environmental health, in three buildings at the University of Toronto, was examined using five different methods. The results indicate that the inhabitants of the buildings consider features other than air quality in considering building health such as design, maintenance...
Environmental Monitoring and Assessment - ENVIRON MONIT ASSESS, 1997
In assessing the risks associated with climate change,downscaling has proven useful in linking su... more In assessing the risks associated with climate change,downscaling has proven useful in linking surfacechanges, at scales relevant to decision making, tolarge-scale atmospheric circulation derived from GCMoutput. Stochastic downscaling is related to synopticclimatology, weather-typing approaches (classifyingcirculation patterns) such as the Lamb Weather Typesdeveloped for the United Kingdom (UK), the EuropeanGrosswetterlagen (Bardossy and Plate, 1992) and thePerfect Prognosis (Perfect Prog) method from numericalweather prediction. The large-scale atmosphericcirculation is linked with site-specific observationsof atmospheric variables, such as precipitation, windspeed or temperature, within a specified region. Classifying each day by circulation patterns isachieved by clustering algorithms, fuzzy rule bases,neural nets or decision trees. The linkages areextended to GCM output to account for climate change. Stochastic models are developed from the probabilitydistributions for extreme e...
ABSTRACT In the last decade, climate change has been one of the major concerns with regard to the... more ABSTRACT In the last decade, climate change has been one of the major concerns with regard to the health of the earth’s ecosystem. The problem of a changing climate is related to not only climate, energy consumption and emissions of greenhouse gases, but also effects of such a change on the earth’s ecosystems, resources and human settlements, as well as the need to reduce or avoid these effects. In this study, an inexact-fuzzy multiobjective programming model was proposed for adaptation planning of land resources management in the Mackenzie Basin under changing climate. This integrated adaptation planning enables the inclusion of systems interaction and feedback mechanisms and can therefore yield insights that scattered information cannot offer. Many sectors were considered, including agriculture, forest, wildlife habitat preservation, wetland preservation, hunting, recreation, and soil conservation, as well as their interactive relationships. The results indicate that uncertain, multiobjective, dynamic and interactive features of the study system have been effectively reflected. Temporal variations of land characteristics and land-use activities exist due to changes in climatic, economic and environmental conditions. However, through effective systems analysis and planning, the desired land-use patterns for adapting to the changing climate and compromising objectives from different stakeholders could be obtained.
Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 2000
The ongoing drought in the Sahel region of West Africa highlights the vulnerability of food-produ... more The ongoing drought in the Sahel region of West Africa highlights the vulnerability of food-producing systems to climate change and variability. Adaptation to climate should therefore increase the sustainability of agriculture under a long-term drought. Progress towards sustainability and adaptation in the the Senegal River Basin is hampered by an existing set of social and ecological relationships that define the
... BC V6T 1Z4, Canada. f2 Current address: Institute of Enviromental Studies, University of Toro... more ... BC V6T 1Z4, Canada. f2 Current address: Institute of Enviromental Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A4, Canada. Journal of Environmental Management Volume 48, Issue 1, September 1996, Pages 45-68. ...
Climate change presents problems for risk assessment procedures due to the difficulty of assignin... more Climate change presents problems for risk assessment procedures due to the difficulty of assigning a measure of probability to any future scenario. Grey systems theory provides an alternative means of quantifying uncertainty based on interval numbers. Within a mathematical ...
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is used to evaluate the benefits, primarily from reduced energy consu... more Life cycle assessment (LCA) is used to evaluate the benefits, primarily from reduced energy consumption, resulting from the addition of a green roof to an eight story residential building in Madrid. Building energy use is simulated and a bottom-up LCA is conducted assuming a 50 year building life. The key property of a green roof is its low solar absorptance, which causes lower surface temperature, thereby reducing the heat flux through the roof. Savings in annual energy use are just over 1%, but summer cooling load is reduced by over 6% and reductions in peak hour cooling load in the upper floors reach 25%. By replacing the common flat roof with a green roof, environmental impacts are reduced by between 1.0 and 5.3%. Similar reductions might be achieved by using a white roof with additional insulation for winter, but more substantial reductions are achieved if common use of green roofs leads to reductions in the urban heat island.
Indoor environmental health is now recognized as an important factor in preventing respiratory he... more Indoor environmental health is now recognized as an important factor in preventing respiratory health problems in the United States. It is also a concern in Canada due to the amount of time that Canadians spend indoors because of cold weather and the potential for increased time indoors during the summer if the climate warms. The negative health effects are often labeled as sick building syndrome, but diagnosing a building or its occupants as sick is complicated by the variety of symptoms, the presence of chronic versus acute symptoms and social and psychological (socio-psychological) factors that may reduce the effectiveness of an engineering solution. As a case study, the contribution of various factors to indoor environmental health, in three buildings at the University of Toronto, was examined using five different methods. The results indicate that the inhabitants of the buildings consider features other than air quality in considering building health such as design, maintenance...
Environmental Monitoring and Assessment - ENVIRON MONIT ASSESS, 1997
In assessing the risks associated with climate change,downscaling has proven useful in linking su... more In assessing the risks associated with climate change,downscaling has proven useful in linking surfacechanges, at scales relevant to decision making, tolarge-scale atmospheric circulation derived from GCMoutput. Stochastic downscaling is related to synopticclimatology, weather-typing approaches (classifyingcirculation patterns) such as the Lamb Weather Typesdeveloped for the United Kingdom (UK), the EuropeanGrosswetterlagen (Bardossy and Plate, 1992) and thePerfect Prognosis (Perfect Prog) method from numericalweather prediction. The large-scale atmosphericcirculation is linked with site-specific observationsof atmospheric variables, such as precipitation, windspeed or temperature, within a specified region. Classifying each day by circulation patterns isachieved by clustering algorithms, fuzzy rule bases,neural nets or decision trees. The linkages areextended to GCM output to account for climate change. Stochastic models are developed from the probabilitydistributions for extreme e...
ABSTRACT In the last decade, climate change has been one of the major concerns with regard to the... more ABSTRACT In the last decade, climate change has been one of the major concerns with regard to the health of the earth’s ecosystem. The problem of a changing climate is related to not only climate, energy consumption and emissions of greenhouse gases, but also effects of such a change on the earth’s ecosystems, resources and human settlements, as well as the need to reduce or avoid these effects. In this study, an inexact-fuzzy multiobjective programming model was proposed for adaptation planning of land resources management in the Mackenzie Basin under changing climate. This integrated adaptation planning enables the inclusion of systems interaction and feedback mechanisms and can therefore yield insights that scattered information cannot offer. Many sectors were considered, including agriculture, forest, wildlife habitat preservation, wetland preservation, hunting, recreation, and soil conservation, as well as their interactive relationships. The results indicate that uncertain, multiobjective, dynamic and interactive features of the study system have been effectively reflected. Temporal variations of land characteristics and land-use activities exist due to changes in climatic, economic and environmental conditions. However, through effective systems analysis and planning, the desired land-use patterns for adapting to the changing climate and compromising objectives from different stakeholders could be obtained.
Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 2000
The ongoing drought in the Sahel region of West Africa highlights the vulnerability of food-produ... more The ongoing drought in the Sahel region of West Africa highlights the vulnerability of food-producing systems to climate change and variability. Adaptation to climate should therefore increase the sustainability of agriculture under a long-term drought. Progress towards sustainability and adaptation in the the Senegal River Basin is hampered by an existing set of social and ecological relationships that define the
... BC V6T 1Z4, Canada. f2 Current address: Institute of Enviromental Studies, University of Toro... more ... BC V6T 1Z4, Canada. f2 Current address: Institute of Enviromental Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A4, Canada. Journal of Environmental Management Volume 48, Issue 1, September 1996, Pages 45-68. ...
Climate change presents problems for risk assessment procedures due to the difficulty of assignin... more Climate change presents problems for risk assessment procedures due to the difficulty of assigning a measure of probability to any future scenario. Grey systems theory provides an alternative means of quantifying uncertainty based on interval numbers. Within a mathematical ...
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