GECHS

The Climate Adaptation Futures Conference will be held 29 june -  1 July 2010 at the Gold Coast Convention Centre , Queensland, Australia. The conference will be one of the first international forums to focus solely on climate impacts and adaptation and it will bring together scientists and decision makers from developed and developing countries to share research approaches, methods and results.  It will explore the way forward in a world where impacts are increasingly observable and adaptation actions are increasingly required.

Abstracts must be received by January 18, 2010

The Annual Conference of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) will be held on April 14-18, 2010, in Washington D.C. GECHS SSC-member Joni Seager (Bentley University) is co-organising a paper session on “Gender and Climate Change – Pitfalls, Possibilities and Realities”, with Farhana Sultana (Syracuse University). Sponsors are Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group (CAPE), Development Geographies Specialty Group (DGSG), and Geographical Perspectives on Women Specialty Group (GPOW).

Geographers are uniquely situated to engage with the ways that nature-society relations are differentiated along gender lines, bringing fresh perspectives and critical lenses to the ways that climate change impacts and adaptation efforts are understood, experienced and acted up differently across axes of social differentiation, sites and scales. A gender perspective can thus provide insights to enrich existing debates, demonstrating the ways that drivers of climate change, vulnerability, resiliency, adaptation, policy-making, and decision-making are all bound up with various constructions of gender and difference, which have important outcomes in the ways that climate changes come to affect people and places. This session seeks to engender climate change debates and bring critical geography perspectives into conversation with the dominant narratives around climate change, related impacts, mitigation, and adaptation. Papers are invited that engage with such concerns.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to both organizers by 15 October 2009. For more information on the AAG conference, please visit the conference website.  Please note that there is no funding to assist attendance to the AAG conference.

The international conference Climate Change, Social Stress and Violent Conflict, will be organized at the Klima Campus at Hamburg University, November 19-20, 2009. The workshop aims to bring together national and international experts to explore and discuss main elements of the current “state of the art” in terms of knowledge on security implications and conflict potential of climate change. Furthermore participants will explore research needs, both with respect to problem analysis and methodologies. Besides providing a snapshot of the current debate, it aims at building connections among individuals and research groups that can provide a basis for establishing an international network on climate security and conflict.

These are some of the guiding questions for the conference:

• What are the major causal chains between climate change and violent conflict, and what is the empirical basis for these linkages, revisiting previous assessments of environmental conflict?

• Which approaches, methods and theories are helpful for the analysis of the links between climate change, social stress and violent conflict?

• Is it adequate to call climate change a threat to national or international security?

• Are broader security conceptions (such as environmental or human security) useful for evaluating the violence risks of climate change?

• What is the likelihood, potential damage and resulting risk for violent conflict of water and food scarcity, mass migrations and natural disasters induced by climate change?

Deadline for submission of abstracts is August 31, 2009. Send abstracts of maximum one page to: ClimateSecurity@uni-hamburg.de (Subject line: Abstract Climate Conflict Conference). The conference organizer is KlimaCampus, Universität Hamburg.

The GECHS project is currently in its synthesis phase, and therefore a special issue of IHDP UPDATE Magazine has been dedicated to important themes in the process of synthesising 10 years of research on human security and global environmental change. The GECHS Synthesis Conference was organised June 22-24 2009, at the University of Oslo, Norway, as part of this synthesis process. At this conference, the new role for “human dimensions” research on human security in a rapidly changing world was discussed. Building on these multiple perspectives and a wide range of thematic and geographical expertise, the IHDP Secretariat and GECHS co-published this special issue of the IHDP UPDATE magazine, No. 2 2009, which is available for download here.

GECHS chair Karen O’Brien is co-editor of this comprehensive book on adaptation to climate change, with Neil Adger, University of East Anglia and Irene Lorenzoni, University of East Anglia. The book presents the latest science and social science research on whether the world can adapt to climate change. Written by experts, both academics and practitioners, it examines the risks to ecosystems, demonstrating how values, culture and the constraining forces of governance act as barrier to action. The book includes historical, contemporary, and future insights into adaptation to climate change. It covers adaptation issues from different perspectives: climate science, hydrology, engineering, ecology, economics, human geography, anthropology and political science; and contains contributions from leading researchers and practitioners from around the world.