GECHS

Podcasts and presentations are now available from the conference Living with climate change: are there limits to adaptation? The very successful conference were held the 7 & 8 February 2008 by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the University of Oslo, and was supported by GECHS. The overall objective of the conference was to consider strategies for adapting to climate change, in particular to explore the potential barriers to adaptation that may limit the ability of societies to adapt to climate change and to identify opportunities for overcoming these barriers. Please find the podcasts and presentations from the conference at the Tyndall Centre website.

 

 Karen O'Brien - Climate Change and Changing Values in Norway: Are there limits to adaptation?: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The Coastal City Summit will be held 17-20 November 2008 in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA. One of the most challenging issues facing the ocean today is rapid coastal urbanization whose implications have yet to be assessed. Today, the majority of the world’s population lives within sixty kilometers of the coast line and this is steadily increasing. This profound demographic shift has significant implications for the coastal environment, inhabitants and ecosystem stability. Combined with increasing birth rate and life expectancy, as well as future climate change, the escalating strain on public resources means that coastal city managers face unprecedented challenges. The summit aims to bring together coastal city leaders, managers, and academics to discuss environmental, social, economic, and public policy challenges and viable solutions. Deadline for proposals is 15 May 2008. Completed research papers, case studies, panels and round table discussion papers will be considered. Please find the guidelines for proposals at the conference website.

The second International Sustainability Conference, ISC, will be held on 21 and 22 August 2008 at the University of Basel, Switzerland. The Central theme of the conference is “Creating values for sustainable development”, and provides a platform for both interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary oriented social scientists working in the field of sustainable development. The conference is committed to promoting dialogue, especially among economists and other social scientists. Moreover, the conference aims to act as a meeting point for committed individuals from the political, corporate and academic world as well as for representatives from civil society. Abstracts can be submitted before 16 February 2008. For further details, please refer to the conference website.

An international symposium titled “Coping with global change in marine social-ecological systems” will be held in Rome in July 2008. Principal sponsors of the symposium are GLOBEC, EUR-OCEANS and FAO. Marine socio-ecological systems have marine and human components which are highly inter-connected and interactive. The IPCC report identifies the need to make social-ecological systems more resilient by building “adaptive capacity”. This is an issue on which both natural and social scientists can contribute, for example by identifying the essential characteristics of such systems and relevant approaches to building such capacity. By “global change” the symposium includes climate change, but also resource over-exploitation, competing uses of the marine environment, changing lifestyles, and globalisation of trade and economies. While the focus is on climate and environmental change, how these interact with other global changes are important considerations. The central goals of the symposium are to share experiences across disciplines and to identify key next steps and common elements and approaches that promote resilience of marine social-ecological systems in he face of global changes. This involves:

• Exploring conceptual issues relating to social-ecological responses in marine systems to global changes;
• Analysing case studies of specific examples of social-ecological responses in marine systems to significant environmental changes manifested locally;
• Synthesising the work of natural and social scientists and building comparisons of social-ecological responses in marine ecosystems subjected to major environmental variability;
• Developing innovative approaches to the use of science and knowledge in management, policy and advice;
• Identifying lessons for governance for building resilient social-ecological systems.

For information and registration, see the symposium website.

The 7th International Science Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (Open Meeting) will be organised by The International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change, IHDP. The conference, which was originally scheduled for 15 - 19 October 2008 in New Delhi, will take place from 26 - 30 April 2009 in Bonn, Germany. With the theme of the 7th Open Meeting, “Social Challenges of Global Change”, IHDP wants to indicate the need to incorporate not only the general discussion about climate change, but also many other environmental changes which happen in our society: resource shortages, the destruction of ecosystem services, and new threats to human health. Four core questions on the social aspects of environmental change will be addressed:

• How do we deal with demographic challenges?
• How do we deal with limitations of resources and ecosystem services?
• How do we maintain social cohesion while increasing (global) equity?
• How do we adapt institutions to address global change?

GECHS will contribute with numerous sessions and paper presentations in the conference. For more information, please see the conference website.