START

EXTENDED Call for Applications: Workshop in Bangkok, Thailand on Asian Coastal Cities

Lauren Gibbons — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:02:59 +0000

The International Workshop will be held on August 23 to September 1, 2010, in Bangkok, Thailand

Note: The Deadline has been extended to 20 March 2010

The Southeast Asia START Regional Center and the East-West Center are pleased to announce a Call for Applications for an upcoming International Workshop to address the risks of flooding in Asian Megacties. With support from The Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN) the Workshop on “Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment and Urban Development Planning for Asian Coastal Cities” will be held on August 23 to September 1, 2010, in Bangkok, Thailand.

The Workshop objectives include:

1) The development of capacity on the part of urban planners, managers, and researchers in climate change risk and vulnerability assessment and its application to urban development planning and governance.
2) The promotion of locally led risk and vulnerability research in Asian coastal cities that is linked to user needs.
3) The development of partnerships between researchers, planners, and policy makers that encourage “communities of knowledge” for vulnerability assessment in each participating city.

The Workshop invites researchers, urban planners and managers, practitioners, professionals and policymakers interested in and working on topics related to the workshop topics to submit an Application to the Southeast Asia Regional Center by the extended deadline 20 March 2010.

The Application must include:

A curriculum vitae for each applicant
A written letter of interest describing the relevance of the workshop to the applicant/team’s academic or professional work and expected benefits of participation
All materials should be submitted in English

For more information, please review the Call for Applications or contact car2@start.or.th.

Call for Applications: Managing Transitions to Sustainable Communities and Regions

Lauren Gibbons — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:48:43 +0000

Global change offers new challenges and new opportunities for communities around the world. While climate change and carbon dioxide emission limits are being discussed at the global level, implementation of policies seeking to mitigate or adapt to global change will be conducted at the local level.

In response the “Managing Transitions to Sustainable Communities and Regions” Workshop will be held in Ithaca, NY from 14-18 June 2010. A workshop is being organized for early career scholars and professionals on all aspects of managing transitions to sustainable communities and regions–systems engineering, project management, simulation modeling, forecasting, computation and visualization, and political mobilization. Currently, in many parts of the world, planning expertise to mitigate and adapt to climate change and promote sustainable lifestyles is lacking at local and regional scales, where important decisions determining future climate pathways are being made. In addition, global integrated assessment models do not account for changes in infrastructure, which will be made at the regional level, or technologies exploiting new infrastructure in their estimates of future emissions and economic impacts. We plan a cross-disciplinary workshop to present and promote research that will facilitate transitions to interdependent systems that will support sustainable communities and regions. We will accept ~20 participants, and provide travel, and local support.

This will be a working workshop, where participants will be expected to spend some time prior to the workshop, during the workshop and after the workshop contributing to group whitepapers. Participants will have a chance to present their own work, develop new collaborations and learn from other participants and senior experts from an international diversity of disciplines and approaches.

For the purposes of this workshop, we define “young scholars” as within 10 years of a PhD, or graduate students or if working, within 10 years of starting your career. We are interested in scholars and professionals in a wide variety of fields from city and regional planning to global biogeochemistry, from history of cities to economics to engineering.

Please send a CV, letter of recommendation, statement of interest (<1 page) to apply by March 1, 2010 to CCSF-SummerInst@cornell.edu. This
workshop is sponsored by the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future and AIMES Young Scholars Network. We plan to fund all participants travel and local expenses.

Vacancy Announcement: Director, International Foundation for Science (IFS)

Lauren Gibbons — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:54:18 +0000

The International Foundation for Science (IFS) is a non-governmental organisation with the mandate to contribute to the strengthening of capacity in developing countries. IFS is now recruiting a new Director to lead the organisation based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Currently IFS has a secretariat of 20 staff located in Stockholm, Sweden, and a regional office in Kampala, Uganda. The secretariat is led by the Director who reports to the Board of Trustees. The Director has overall responsibility for implementing the strategic goals of the organisation, managing the secretariat and overseeing day-to-day operations. Applications are due by 12 April 2010.

More information

Global Environmental Changes in South Asia: A Regional Perspective

Lauren Gibbons — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:27:53 +0000

The South Asian Rapid Assessment Programme (SA RAP) initiated by START and supported by the Monsoon Asisa Integrated Regional Studies (MAIRS) programme, has for the first time attempted to synthesize the scientific understanding generated so far by the global change research studies carried out in and for the South Asian region in a holistic manner.

This book aims to encompass most components of physical and human dimensions of change in the Earth systems (viz., climate, ecosystem, atmosphere, resources and sustainable development etc.) that are either affected, or have bearings on the environment and for which the scientific understanding has so far been generated for the South Asian region. The book has been collated in the form of different chapters dealing with the specific issues. Each of these chapters has been contributed by regional researchers and sector experts. The content of this volume will cater to the needs of not only the global change researchers but also academia.

Call for Applications: Education and Training Program in Climate Change and Biodiversity Conservation

Lauren Gibbons — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:00:18 +0000

The 2010 Education and Training Program on Climate Change and Biodiversity Conservation in the Albertine Rift Region of Africa

START and the Institute of Resource Assessment, University of Dar es Salaam, with support from the MacArthur Foundation are pleased to announce the 2010 Education and Training Program on Climate Change and Biodiversity Conservation in the Albertine Rift Region of Africa. Applications are invited from early to mid-career conservation researchers and practitioners; masters-level graduate students; and university educators currently teaching courses related to conservation and natural resource management. Applicants must be African nationals and priority will be given to applicants from the Albertine Rift countries i.e. Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.

The program will offer interdisciplinary learning through the use of course modules that allow participants to acquire knowledge and skills in assessing climate change risks to ecosystems and biodiversity, and strategies for their conservation, and through field externship projects whereby participants are able to apply what they have learned in the course to actual conservation efforts in the region. Participants who are university educators will receive focused training in the use and application of distance learning modules on climate change and biodiversity conservation, rather than participating in field externship projects.

Course modules will be offered at Institute of Resource Assessment, University of Dar es Salaam from July 19 – September 3, 2010. Externship projects will commence immediately following completion of coursework, and are anticipated to last approximately two months. Training in distance learning modules will commence on 6 September 2010 and last approximately one week.

Please see the Information for Applicants for further program details, eligibility criteria and instructions for application. The Application must include:

Completed electronic Application Form
Two (2) Professional Reference Forms submitted by two of the applicant’s references
Completed Institutional Support Form from the applicant’s home institution
Statement of Current Activities and Future Plans
Preliminary Proposal for Externship Research OR Brief Statement of Teaching Plans
Official University Transcript
Resume/Curriculum Vitae

The Deadline for Applications is: March 12, 2010

For further enquiries, please contact:

Jyoti Kulkarni, International START Secretariat: jkulkarni@start.org
Prof. Pius Yanda, Director, Institute of Resource Assessment: yanda@ira.udsm.ac.tz

More information about the Biodiversity in the Albertine Rift Program

WCRP Open Science Conference: Climate Research in Service to Society

Lauren Gibbons — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:45:41 +0000

WCRP Open Science Conference (OSC), in October 2011, in Denver Colorado

The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) will assemble for the first time ever its affiliated research community, and engage other key international research programmes, in a major Open Science Conference (OSC) in October 2011. Through a unique synthesis of presented research findings, the OSC will assess our current state of knowledge on climate variability and change, identify the most urgent scientific issues and research challenges, and ascertain how WCRP can best facilitate research and develop partnerships critical for progress.

The WCRP OSC represents an exclusive opportunity to assemble the international scientific community working to advance understanding and prediction of variability and change of the Earth’s physical climate system on all space and time scales. The OSC will facilitate cross-cooperation across the diverse research communities within WCRP, as well as with other international research programmes, including the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the World Weather Research Programme (WWRP), the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP) and DIVERSITAS. Such an active dialogue and discussion among international environmental change research communities is required to understand past climate changes and the current state of the climate system; to determine how, when, and where climate change may occur and what its effects will be on other components of the Earth system; and to identify opportunities for humans to mitigate and adapt to these changes.

The OSC will:

Appraise the current state of climate science, thereby making a measurable scientific contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC);
Identify key opportunities and challenges in observations, modelling and analysis;
Advance process research required to understand and predict responses of the Earth as a system, thus helping chart the path forward over the ensuing decades.

By entraining as many young scientists and students as possible from across the world, including less developed and developing countries, the OSC will
facilitate growth of the diverse future workforce needed to meet the increasingly complex scientific challenges of the future.

Download Announcement

START E-Newsletter: January 2010

Lauren Gibbons — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:15:11 +0000

START E-Newsletter: January 2010

START publishes the January 2010 issue of its Quarterly E-Newsletter. This E-Newsletter features highlights of START Programs & Activities in 2009 and provides a glimpse of activities to come in 2010.

January 2010 E-Newsletter

Subscribe to the START E-Newsletter

Challenge Program for Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) seeking Regional Facilitators

Lauren Gibbons — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:59:42 +0000

Locations: Niamey, Niger; Nairobi, Kenya; Delhi, India

Positions: CCAFS is seeking Regional Facilitators for West Africa, Eastern Africa and the Indo-Gangetic Plains. The Regional Facilitators will be hosted by CGIAR centres operating in the regions, and will be employed through the host Centre.

CCAFS: With a Secretariat at the Department of Ecology and Agriculture at the University of Copenhagen, and Theme Leaders and Regional Facilitators to be based on several continents, CCAFS is a global initiative established to overcome the additional threats posed by a changing climate to achieving food security, enhancing livelihoods and improving environmental management. CCAFS is a program of the CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) and the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP). This ESSP-CGIAR collaboration, with their respective partners, brings together the world’s best talent in agricultural science, development research, climate science and Earth System science (www.ccafs.cgiar.org).

Regional Facilitators: The Regional Facilitators will play a crucial role in CCAFS. The ‘benchmark sites’ will be selected by a regional stakeholder group coordinated by the Regional Facilitator, and in close consultation with Theme Leaders. Facilitators will be responsible for ongoing coordination of activities, including ensuring close integration of work from multiple themes. A key role of the Regional Facilitators is to ensure the links between researchers and the multitude of relevant stakeholders, from farm to regional
level. Regional Facilitators will be key in fostering outcomes and impact. They will have a major role in facilitating scenario development in each region. Regional facilitators will assist the Director in fundraising and undertaking regional synthesis activities. They will be part of the CCAFS Management Team.

Deadline: 20 February 2010

Download Full Announcement

CCAFS Website

ACCFP Post-Doc Fellow Henri Tonnang Zefack circulates Fellowship project results at the COP-15

Lauren Gibbons — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:14:00 +0000

In February 2009, Dr. Henri Tonnang Zefack began his ACCFP Fellowship at the Institute of Resource Assessment, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Originally from Cameroon, Dr. Tonnang Zefack’s research is entitled “Predicting and mapping the potential redistribution of malaria vectors in Africa: Informing malaria control programmes” for his ACCFP Post-Doctoral Fellowship Project. In December 2009, Dr. Tonnang compiled his research in a poster, that was circulated to participants at the UNFCCC COP-15, in Copenhagen, Denmark. The poster is now available below. Please click to view in full size or download.

More information on Henri Tonnang’s ACCFP Fellowship

More information on the ACCFP Program

The Disproportional Impacts of Climate Change, from Global to Local Levels: the Story of Doune Baba Dieye

blog2 — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:23:48 +0000

Vulnerability to Climate Change has a distinctive nature, one which one of my dear colleagues coins “fractal”. Fractals are rough geometric shapes that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole . As a result of this inherent property of the object, it displays self-similarity, in a somewhat technical sense, on all scales.

Well, climate change vulnerability operates in the same manner as a fractal does. At the global scale, there are winners (those who will not suffer from the immediate impacts of climate change), and there are those who lose and are left to bear the brunt of adaptation to a changing climate. The more you zoom in geographically however, this pattern of winners and losers from climate change is also replicated, whether you are at the national scale, at the district scale or at the community scale.

This concept is a theoretical model that struck me as an adequate depiction of reality when, last week, I visited a small island community in Northern Senegal: the village of Doune Baba Dieye, in the Delta region of Saint-Louis (see map 1).

Located a forty-five minute boat ride away from the city of Saint-Louis, Northern Senegal’s capital, Doune Baba Dieye is a small island on the Senegal River Delta in between land and ocean, from which it is only shielded by a long narrow strip of land known as the Langue de Barbarie.

The 750 inhabitants of the island live mostly on fishing and market gardening. Until recent years, Doune Baba was the main provider of market produce for the entire Saint-Louis region, and its inhabitants enjoyed a relatively prosperous life – with revenues approximating 60,000CFA/year – living off a river replete with fish and farming on the Langue de Barbarie .

Today, Doune Baba is a village on the verge of extinction due to permanent flooding, year-round tides and river floods that combine to make the village nearly uninhabitable.

In 2003, abnormally strong rains fell over the region and the Senegal River rose to dangerous levels. Hydrologists watching the river level upstream at the Diama dam, warned that if nothing was done, the river would flow downstream with a velocity that would overcome the dikes protecting the city of Saint-Louis. Public discontent with authorities was coming to a zenith after a month of flooding, and public pressure on local authorities to take action to relieve flooding was so great that the central government was called in. The authorities of the Senegal government decided to dig an outlet canal (practically, a hole of 3-4 meters) in the middle of the Langue de Barbarie to allow the River to join the Atlantic Ocean earlier, 20km before its natural exit at the mouth of the river, located at the southern tip of the Langue de Barbarie, named the Gandiol (see map 2). The results were immediate: within 48 hours the water level of the river began to drop, and after ten days the water level was approximately one meter lower. The canal’s inauguration ceremony was televised and all applauded this positive action on the part of the Senegalese government to come to the help of its its vulnerable inhabitants of the city of Saint-Louis.

Now let us now fast forward to six years later. The breach has now reached a diameter of 1500 meters (from its original four meters) and continues to grow as the primary exit point where the Senegal River drains into the Atlantic. The former mouth of the river (at Gandiol) is almost completely sealed, as a result of wave action depositing sediments from the new “outlet canal” to the southern tip of the Langue de Barbarie (see map 3).

Doune Baba Dieye lies directly in front of this new man-made opening, and the Langue de Barbarie that used to shield it from the Atlantic is no more, parted as it is in half. As a result, the village of Doune Baba Dieye, can no longer provide for themselves, as fishing and farming have become ghost industries, due to increased water table salinization and diminished fish catch. The direct exposure to the ocean brings an increase in tidal activity in the River, griping inhabitants in fear that the floodwaters might take them away during their sleep.

Thus, the opening of the Langue de Barbarie breach provided a solution to stop flooding in Saint-Louis (winners) but in the process it sacrificed the populations of Doune Baba Dieye and surrounding villages (losers).

From December 2-4, 2009, an “Early Warning – Early Action” Initiative chose Doune Baba Dieye as a pilot site to discuss how communities could learn to live with their changing climate and could benefit from climate and weather forecasts. The 3-day workshop, held in Saint-Louis, was organized by the International Federation of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) Zone office for West and Central Africa and focused on the theme of “Community Early Warning – Early Action: Bridging the gap between climate scientists and communities”.

Following a similar structure of a July 2009 “Early Warning – Early Action” Workshop (facilitated by a 2009/2010 ACCFP Fellowship awarded to Arame Tall), the IFRC appropriated its concept of bringing together scientists and communities, engage with one another through a range of games and interactive activities. The workshop convened more than 10 scientists from all levels of forecasting at the national level (national, regional and district) with 15 Red Cross community volunteers and the two community spokespeople from Doune Baba Dieye, Ahmed Diagne and Birane Sene.

The main goals of this endeavor were:
1) Convene all the Senegalese institutions involved in climate, weather and hydrological forecasting with two key users of these forecasts (members of the Red Cross and vulnerable communities), in order to jointly lay the foundations of an operational multi-hazard pilot Early Warning Early Action system;
2) To establish mechanisms to make climate forecasts trickle down to communities at risk, such as Doune Baba Dieye, either directly or via the extensive network of community volunteers of the Red Cross, present in literally every community in Senegal, who can serve as community relays of meteorological forecasts;
3) Identify current climate, weather and hydrological information needs of the Senegalese Red Cross and the communities they serve;
4) Prioritize early actions that could be taken in response to plausible predictions delivered by Red Cross;
5) Propose improved content and format of hazard-related forecasts, devising templates for operational alerts to be sent out to Red Cross.

Thus were laid the challenges: on the one hand were the residents of Doune Baba Dieye, who embodied vulnerability to a changing climate (both directly, and as casualties of bad Climate Change adaptation policy making) and could largely benefit from receive flood forecasts that; and on the other, were the providers of these forecasts (scientists able to tell the inhabitants of Doune Baba when flood is coming, or when to go at sea or not because of swells, etc.) bringing to bear the Red Cross, their community relays.

Just as in the July workshop, again the results of these three days of complete interaction were magical:

Both scientists and communities learnt to know and listen to each other;

They realized their usefulness to one another, and realized that they were natural partners in the endeavor to save lives in communities vulnerable to climate changes across the country;

They agreed to never again Know without Acting (the scientists), nor Act without knowing (the communities);

Last but not least, the Red Cross and the National Meteorological Agency pledged to draft and sign a partnership document (MoU) to provide an official framework for their interaction, one that would enable the transfer of meteorological information from the forecasters to the communities via the Red Cross volunteers, and feedback from the communities to the forecasters.

From the workshop also emanated interesting perspectives on how to improve workshop methodology, to allow its replication beyond the borders of Senegal. Towards the goal of bridging the gap between scientists (providers of an essential public good: information about when danger looms) and vulnerable communities (natural beneficiaries of such early information) in other countries across the region, and the world.

Most significant in my eyes was the fact that scientists (seldom in contact with the users of their information) came out from this workshop learning they needed to listen to vulnerable communities (at whose service they are).

Indeed, at the end of the workshop a trip was organized to Doune Baba Dieye and community meeting was held during which community folks clearly spoke about what their climate information needs were. For the first time, the National Met Agency, scientists and the Red-Cross went side-by-side directly to a local community to address their needs and think of what could be done in anticipation of disasters (ex-ante preparation).

We hope that these needs will from now onwards be taken into consideration by forecasters. Most of all, we hope that in Saint Louis the founding stone was posed for the establishment of an operational multi-hazard EWS for Senegal, one urgently needed in the country to do away with unnecessary loss of lives and damage and following completely predictable disasters.

Map 1 - Saint-Louis Region in Senegal

Map 2 - In 2003, a canal opening was dug directly in front of Doune Baba Island

Map 3 - After the Langue de Barbarie canal is opened, the old mouth of the river is closing up