Welcome to UGEC Today, more than half of the world's population lives in cities. It is clear that the development of urban areas holds the key to many of the challenges we face in our interactions with the environment. The International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) exhibiting its increased focus on urban areas initiated recently the Urbanization and Global Environmental Change core project.This IHDP core project seeks to provide a better understanding of the interactions and feedbacks between global environmental change and urbanization at the local, regional, and global scales through an innovative conceptual and methodological framework. To capture the benefits of urbanization and mitigate as well as adapt to negative environmental and socioeconomic impacts, a stronger collaboration between academics, political decision-makers and practitioners is encouraged. As urbanization represents a critical topic of special policy relevance in today's world, the UGEC core project represents an unrivalled opportunity for addressing critical issues of worldwide importance that have not received adequate attention so far.  UGEC News'Climate Proofing Cities' Call for AbstractsThe SENSE Research School for Socio-Economic and Natural Sciences of the Environment is a joint venture of the environmental research institutes of nine leading universities in The Netherlands. The upcoming SENSE Symposium ‘Climate Proofing Cities’ provides a major opportunity to discuss key developments for cities in the climate debate with an inspiring international audience. Session themes include: balancing adaptation and mitigation, future city design, greening the city, and public health and urbanization. Abstract submissions are due August 1st. The one-day event is organized in close cooperation with the three-day 2009 Amsterdam Conference on the 'Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change’, which will take place in the same location on 2-4 December 2009. The back-to-back planning of these two international meetings will allow participation in both events. More information about the SENSE Symposium and how to submit you abstract is available here. International Conference on Megacities: Risk, Vulnerability and Sustainable DevelopmentLeipzig, GermanySeptember 7-9, 2009 The "Risk Habitat Megacity" research initiative, a collaborative effort of research centres in the German Helmholtz Association and international research partners from Latin America will host the conference Megacities: Risk, Vulnerability and Sustainable Development. The event will take place at the KUBUS Conference Centre at the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research- UFZ GmbH in Leipzig, Germany from September 7-9 2009. About 300 participants from all over the world are expected to take part in this international event. Leading scientists from around the world will present and discuss current knowledge and future challenges in the area of megacity research, in particular practical implementation in the management of urban systems with respect to sustainable development and the role of megacities in global change processes including climate change. These topics will be explored by keynote lectures in plenary, thematic sessions with in-depth discussions, a poster exhibition as well as a "young researchers workshop". The conference language is English. Detailed conference information can be found here. UGEC SSC member David Simon chairs UN-HABITAT's Cities and Climate Change Initiative (CCCI) conference"Professor David Simon, Head of the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, chaired the launch conference of the UN-HABITAT’s Cities and Climate Change Initiative (CCCI) in Oslo on 17 March.  Image Source: Royal Holloway, University of London The event, held at the Felix Conference Centre and supported by the Norwegian government, also saw Professor Simon make a concluding presentation in the plenary strategic session." For more information click here UGEC SSC Co-chair Karen C. Seto named Leopold Leadership FellowCongratulations Karen! "Nineteen environmental researchers from across North America have been awarded Leopold Leadership Fellowships for 2009. Based at Stanford University's Woods Institute for the Environment, the Leopold Leadership Program was founded in 1998 to help academic scientists communicate scientific information more effectively to journalists, policymakers, business leaders and the public. Each year the program selects as many as 20 mid-career academic environmental scientists as fellows." For more information click here International Forum of GEC and Land Use Change in Peri-Urban Area: Dialogue and Experience of Asian Cities, 29 November 2008, Taipei, Taiwan (A report by Prof. Shu-Li Huang)The International Forum of GEC and Land Use Change in Peri-Urban Area: Dialogue and Experience of Asian Cities conference a dissemination event of PU-GEC Project (PUGEC website) was held in Taipei, Taiwan on November 29 2008, at the National Taipei University. Approximately eighty faculty, students and interested scholars attended the one-day event. The primary focus of this Forum was to frame the relationship between land use changes in peri-urban areas in Asian cities with the global environmental change issues.  Image Copyright: Shu-Li Huang Beginning the one-day Forum were keynote addresses by Professor Karen Seto, the current chair of Scientific Steering Committee of Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC) project of IHDP, and Professor Ian Douglas, past chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Peri-Urban? Environmental Change (PU-ECH) project of SCOPE. In her opening remarks, Professor Seto’s speech, entitled “Urbanization and Global Environmental Change in Asia: Challenges and Prospects for Sustainability”, focused on the issues that peri-urbanization raises for Asian communities. Her presentation concluded with a focused examination of both challenges and opportunities that peri-urbanization raises for sustainability in Asian cities. In Professor Douglas’ speech, he discussed the nature and character of peri-urban areas. These areas, as he noted, are the transition zones, or interaction zones, where urban and rural activities are juxtaposed, and landscape features are subject to rapid modifications induced by human activities. Moreover, they are impermanent; shifting in location as urban development proceeds. Today’s urban fringe he noted may become tomorrow’s suburb and the next century’s inner city. Read more about the event... Other newsUGEC Online Bibliographic DatabaseIf you would like to try out our new online bibliographic database please log in and click the UGEC BiblioDB tab under the MEMBERS category on the left menu bar. The database is a consistently updated from various sources for articles and books on Urbanization and Global Environmental Change. If you don't see your article or articles you think are important to our theme, feel free to email us and we will add them to the database. UGEC weblogStarting in June of 2008, our new mechanism for news distribution is the UGEC weblog. Below you can find the most recent entries in the blog. Clicking on a post title will get you the the main text of the post:
The RSS feed can be found here News from the PressWhat follows is a short selection of news streaming out of popular media sources on the topic of Urbanization and Global Environmental Change...
Created by: admin last modification: Tuesday 09 of June, 2009 [17:11:51 UTC] by cgriffi9 |
Noteworthy... UPCOMING EVENTS International Association for Urban Climate (IAUC)Seventh International Conference on Urban Climate (ICUC-7) Yokohama, Japan, June 29 - July 3, 2009 International Conference on Megacities: Risk, Vulnerability and Sustainable Development Leipzig, Germany, September 7-9, 2009 Low Carbon Cities 45th ISOCARP International Congress Porto, Portugal, October 18-22, 2009 SENSE-Research School for Socio-Economic and Natural Sciences of the Environment Symposium,"Climate Proofing Cities" Amsterdam/Volendam, Netherlands, December 1-4, 2009 PAST EVENTS Fifth Urban Research Symposium, "Cities and Climate Change: Responding to an Urgent Agenda" Marseille, France, June 28-30, 2009 GECHS Synthesis Conference: Human Security in an Era of Global Change Oslo, Norway, June 22-24, 2009 IHDP Open Meeting 2009, 26-30 April 2009, Bonn, Germany (Information on the UGEC specific sessions, side-event on Cities and Global Environmental Change and the UGEC workshop following the OM '09 can be found here) Climate Change Congress, Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions, 10-12 March 2009, Copenhagen, Denmark (Roberto Sanchez Rodriguez, UGEC Scientific Steering committee co-chair, will be chairing Session 33 on 'Adaptation to Climate Change in Urban Areas') Cities at Risk: Building Adaptive Capacity for Climate Change in Asia’s Coastal Megacities, 26-28 February 2009, Bangkok, Thailand World Urban Forum 4(WUF4): Harmonious Urbanisation Nanjing, China, November 3-6, 2008 MEDIA DFG Science TV Follow the megacity research of Project Associate, Frauke Kraas in these 12 three-minute videos Yale University Podcast In this interview, UGEC co-chair Karen Seto discusses the important connection of megacities to climate change Science magazine special issue on cities, Science, February 2008 RELATED INITIATIVES UN-HABITAT Sustainable Development Network (SUD-net) UNU-Institute for Advanced Studies TheUrban Resilience Program Urban Climate Change Research Network CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities Tyndall Centre Cities Programme Login |
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