Seminars

Agricultural production is one of the largest contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions as well as the main driver of biodiversity loss, eutrophication, and land-use change. In order to avoid consequences that fundamentally threaten human life on earth, a major transformation is required.

Incentive-based policy instruments, such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) and Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), are at the forefront of global efforts to meet conservation and land use based emissions reduction goals. REDD+ and PES are primarily perceived as instruments aimed at addressing environmental degradation. I

BC3 is pleased to invite you to an online seminar on November 10, at 11.00 am CET that will present the main highlights of the freshly-released 2022 Europe report of the Lancet Countdown – an international research collaboration that brings together 120 leading experts to monitor how the world’s changing climate is impacting public health.

Urbanization is a major driver of global ecological changes. At the same time, ecological dynamics have a substantial impact on urban residents, which includes more than half of the worldwide population. To explore the reciprocal interactions between urbanization and ecological processes I use the Los Angeles, USA megacity region as a case study.

Forest ecosystems are more and more threaten by the increasing biotic and abiotic disturbances triggered by global change. Adapting forest systems to climate change while maintaining their mitigation capacity is the main challenge to achieve a climate smart forestry.

Climate change is caused by human activities, the human dimension is an obvious place to look to find solutions. Yet between 1990 and 2018, social science research received only 0.12% of global research funding into climate change (Overland and Sovacool, 2020). Where they are supported, social sciences and humanities are often placed in service to the research and practice agendas of physical sciences (Kania and Bucksch, 2020). Such under-representation is perpetuated, and carried into the policy and practice arena (Royston and Foulds, 2020), for example through IPCC (Lahsen and Turnhout, 2021).

Urban health research has greatly improved in quality, quantity, and depth over the past 20 years. Just in the last decade, we have seen a large increase in publications, scientific journals, conferences, books, and courses. This growth highlights the fact that there is a large and growing amount of knowledge that could be translated into policies to improve population health and reduce health inequities in cities worldwide.

GLobal BIOsphere Management model (GLOBIOM, Havlík et al. 2014), developed at IIASA is a global economic land use model covering the sectors of agriculture, forestry and bioenergy. GLOBIOM can be used to explore various trade-offs and synergies around land use, ecosystem services and socio-economic objectives.