A Leadership Workshop to Meet the Challenge of Global Climate Change

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Climate change is now widely agreed to be both inevitable and global in scale, but uneven in its consequences for ecosystems on land, in the oceans and for people. Human responses to impending changes, by choice or by necessity will be equally uneven and perhaps more difficult to predict than the physical and ecological changes driving them. As evidence from the past archive has built and models have improved in their ability to simulate the present and project into the future, so the evidence has accumulated increasingly clear signs that change is under way. Changes are spatially uneven, effecting climate zones and climate dynamics differently in different parts of the planet. Regions where changes are expected to be extreme lie close to places where little change is expected. These physical changes imprint themselves on a world where human welfare and development progress is also spatially uneven, sculptured by many forces of global change including the continued growth of population, especially in the poorer countries, the re-shaping of landscapes through human appropriation and the relentless depletion of natural resources. The outcomes for people and their ecological support systems throughout the world are extremely difficult to predict, but as expected the poorer parts of the world are where we see the most severe early. Responses to climate change by national governments, international organizations like the UN, and NGOs have been inconsistent and incoherent. Proposed policy options and engineering remedies are diverse and occasionally bizarre. The public is ill informed and deeply divided. The PIs will organize a one-day high-level community leadership workshop to start to shape such a response. They will assemble national research and education leaders as well as those involved at a high level in the economic and policy debates to deliberate on how to re-shape the country's consciousness on global climate change. The meeting will involve one full day and a preceding evening discussion. To ensure the effectiveness of the process the discussions will be moderated by a professional facilitator who will be responsible for delivering a succinct outcome document in a timely manner shortly following the meeting. Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit of such a workshop will be the setting of an agenda for research and education, agreed upon by the countries' leading actors in agencies and institutions that can effect change to meet the challenge. Broader Impacts: Such an agenda will broadly impact the research community throughout the country to create a coherent and focuses effort in global change studies.