CONCEPT
In the past three years, a growing number of researchers and practitioners have expanded our understanding of the importance of urban areas for global environmental change. The UGEC Project has been leading the way towards a stronger collaboration between academics, decision-makers and practitioners in order to capture the benefits of urbanization and develop ways to mitigate and adapt to global environmental change. Researchers and practitioners in the UGEC network continue to explore new themes within the framework of Global Environmental Change (GEC) science, focusing on new pathways for the sustainability of current and future urban areas, the impacts of GEC on urban areas and the responses of urban areas to those impacts.
The International Conference on Urbanization and Global Environmental Change "Opportunities and Challenges for Sustainability in an Urbanizing World" will be open to scientists, policymakers and the general public and will provide a comprehensive perspective of current knowledge of the dynamic and complex interactions between urbanization and global environmental change. This conference is organized in close cooperation with the Global Land Project (GLP), who will host their Open Science Meeting from October 17-19. GLP is a joint research project for land systems for the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP). Both UGEC and GLP will convene on Sunday, October 17th under the theme of "Sustainable Land Systems in the Era of Urbanization and Climate Change" in order to focus jointly on themes surrounding the urban, land, and climate change interface. The themes that these linkages bring forward are becoming more prominent in global change and climate change science as suggested by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other major agenda-setting reports, recent and forthcoming, internationally. The goal of this day is to build contacts and networks among urban and land-change specialists to foster more collaboration worldwide, expanding the range of issues addressed.