GECHS

A conference on ‘Climate change and security’ is being organized for the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, on the occasion of its 250th anniversary. The conference will take place 21–24 June 2010 in Trondheim, Norway. The purpose of this conference is to examine the broad security implications of climate change. For the last few years, the debate about climate change has increasingly focused on the social implications, including the implications for security and peace. But as yet there is little academic work in this area. While the science of climate change is well established on the basis of peer-reviewed publications, the literature on the security implications remains more speculative. We aim to move this field forward with the joint efforts of scholars from multiple fields.

Over four days, morning plenary sessions will feature keynote addresses by established names in the field. The afternoon sessions will consist of workshops with research papers selected on the basis of an open call. Following the conference, we hope to gather some of the best papers in a special issue of a relevant journal or an edited volume with an academic publisher. More information is published at the conference webpage. You can also go directly to the Call for papers . The Call ends on 31 August 2009.

GECHS will organize 12 sessions with more than 60 paper presentations in the Open Meeting in Bonn 26-30 April 2009. The meeting will take place at the former German Parliament premises on the United Nations Campus.

This 7th Open Meeting, “Social Challenges of Global Change”, addresses the need to incorporate not only the social aspects of climate change, but also the social aspects of many other environmental changes which happen in our society, such as resource shortages, the destruction of ecosystem services, and new threats to human health.

The GECHS sessions cover important aspects of the social challenges of global change, including how to approach the threats to human security, emerging new vulnerabilities in megacities and its implications for human security, interactions between globalization and global environmental change, limits and barriers to climate adaptation, climate change and conflicts, sustainable adaptation, environmental management and human security for disaster resilient communities, sustainability and adaptive capacity, and reducing water insecurity through stakeholder participation.

An overview over these sessions is presented below. The full program for the conference is available at the Open Meeting website.

• Emerging New Vulnerabilities in Megacities and Implications for Human Security
• Emerging Urban Vulnerabilities under Climate Change: Implications for Health and Human Security
• Sustainable Adaptation: Climate Change and Poverty Reduction
• Reducing Water Insecurity through Stakeholder Participation in River Basin Management
• Human Security in the 21st Century
• Double Exposure: Interactions between Globalisation and Global Environmental Change
• Limits I: Barriers and Limits to Adaptation Posed by Governance (international focus)
• Limits II: Barriers and Limits to Adaptation Posed by Governance (National and Subnational Focus)
• Limits III: Barriers and Limits Relating to the Role of Communities in Local Adaptation
• Sustainability and Adaptive Capacity

GECHS associates Hans Günther Brauch and Úrsula Oswald Spring are the first and second editors of Volume IV in the Hexagon Series on Human and Environmental Security and Peace. The title of the new volume is “Facing Global Environmental Change – Environmental, Human, Energy, Food, Health and Water Security Concepts”.

This is a policy-focused, global and multidisciplinary security handbook which addresses new security threats of the 21^st century posed by climate change, desertification, water stress, population growth and urbanization. These are security dangers and concerns that lead to migration, crises and conflicts, and they are on the agenda of the UN, OECD, OSCE, NATO and EU.

The book analyses the global debate on environmental, human and gender, energy, food, livelihood, health and water security concepts and policy problems. They suggest a new research programme to move from knowledge to action, from reactive to proactive policies and to explore the opportunities of environmental cooperation for a new peace policy. For information on the whole Hexagon Series on Human and Environmental Security and Peace, please see the Springer Link website.

Volume III in the Hexagon Series on Human and Environmental Security and Peace is now out in Turkish and Spanish editions. In this reference book on global security thinking, 92 authors from five continents and many disciplines, from science and practice, assess the global reconceptualization of security triggered by the end of the Cold War, globalization and manifold impacts of global environmental change in the early 21st century.

The book addresses the theoretical, philosophical, ethical and religious and spatial context of security and discusses the relationship between security, peace, development and environment. Furthermore, the book reviews the reconceptualization of security in philosophy, international law, economics and political science, the political, military, economic, social and environmental security dimension and the adaptation of the institutional security concepts of the UN, EU and NATO. The book also analyzes the reconceptualization of regional security and alternative security futures and draws conclusions for future research and action.

This book contains revised papers from three workshops at ISA ( Montreal), IPRA ( Sopron) and the Fourth Pan European Conference on International Relations (The Hague) and additional commissioned papers. Here, you can read more about the Spanish edition, and the Turkish edition.

The book “Environmental Change and Globalization: Double Exposures”, written by GECHS Associate Robin Leichenko and GECHS Chair Karen O’Brien, has been selected to receive the 2008 AAG Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography. The book explores the connections between two of the most transformative processes of the twenty-first century, namely global environmental change and globalization. In the book, Leichenko and O’Brien present a conceptual framework for analyzing the interactions between these two processes, and they illustrate, through case studies, how these interactions create situations of “double exposure.” Drawing upon prominent recent and current environmental events – Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, recurring droughts in India, and the melting of the Arctic sea ice – the case studies each demonstrate a different pathway of interaction between globalization and environmental change. The double exposure framework not only sheds light on the challenges raised by these processes, but also possibilities for using the interactions to generate positive opportunities for action.

Read more about the book here.