GECHS

The International Ocean Institute, USA and the city of St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, are hosting a Coastal Cities Summit on November 17-20 2008, to address the complex challenges that coastal city leaders face as populations increase, resources are depleted, and the impacts of climate change are felt.  The Coastal Cities Summit intends to bring together 600-700 coastal city leaders, managers and academics to discuss environmental, social, economic, and public policy challenges and viable solutions. The 3 ½ day conference will focus on three themes: Climate Change, Risk and Vulnerability, and Sustainable Development.  The planners are soliciting speakers on areas that are particularly relevant to coastal cities: freshwater, pollution, energy, infrastructure, and port security.  All sessions are intended to give a long-needed voice to those who are on the front lines taking leadership on climate change, providing implementation and response plans and continuing to focus on protecting citizens from possible extreme events and human-induced degradation. Full details are available at the conference website.

Podcasts and presentations are out for the conference RESILIENCE 2008: Resilience, Adaptation and Transformation in Turbulent Times. GECHS chair Karen O’Brien gave the presentation Rethinking social contracts: building resilience in a changing climate. View her presentation on podcast here. This International Science and Policy Conference was organized in Stockholm, Sweden, 14-18 April, and approached society and nature as interdependent social-ecological systems, which are complex adaptive systems. Furthermore, the focus was on cross scale and dynamic interactions that represent new challenges for governance and management in relation to social-ecological systems and ecosystem services. 9 overall themes helped to shed light on the issues, and the overview can be found on the conference website.

In July 2008, Robin Leichenko and GECHS chair Karen O’Brien will launch the book Environmental Change and Globalization: Double Exposures. 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. The book can be ordered here.

The title of the current IHDP Update is “The Implications of Global Environmental Change for Human Security in Coastal Urban Areas”. The issue is a joint effort by three IHDP core projects: Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC); Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS); and Land-Ocean Interactions in Coastal Zones (LOICZ). It focuses on natural disasters associated with global environmental change in coastal urban areas and sheds light on the main pathways of social and urban vulnerability to natural disasters caused by climate variability and change. The invited authors explore the close links between global environmental change, human security, and urbanization from multidimensional perspectives seeking to provide integrated approaches to those complex interactions. To subscribe to the newsletter, see the IHDP website under Publications.

This years theme for the global Human Development Report is climate change, as the defining human development challenge of the 21st century. The report, “Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world”, states that failure to respond to that challenge will stall and then reverse international efforts to reduce poverty. And looking to the future, no country - however wealthy or powerful - will be immune to the impact of global warming. This Human Development Report argues that climate change poses challenges at many levels. In a divided but ecologically interdependent world, it challenges all people to reflect upon how we manage the environment of the one thing that we share in common: planet Earth. The report points out that climate change challenges us to reflect on social justice and human rights across countries and generations. It challenges political leaders and people in rich nations to acknowledge their historic responsibility for the problem, and to initiate deep and early cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Above all, it challenges the entire human community to undertake prompt and strong collective action based on shared values and a shared vision.