Climate Roadmap related events

Description: This conference was the ninth event in the series of annual European Conferences on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, begun in Berlin in 2001.

This year's conference was also the global launch event of the Earth System Governance Project, a new ten-year research programme under the auspices of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP).

The Earth System Governance Project sought to analyse the interrelated and increasingly integrated system of formal and informal rules, rule-making systems, and actor-networks at all levels of human society (from local to global) that aim to steer societies towards preventing, mitigating, and adapting to global and local environmental change and earth system transformation.

The notion of earth system governance describes an emerging social phenomenon - expressed in hundreds of international regimes, bureaucracies, national agencies, activists groups and expert networks - that engages numerous actors, institutions and networks at local and global levels. At the same time, earth system governance is a demanding and vital subject of research in the social sciences, as was reflected in lively discussions at the 2009 Amsterdam Conference.

The mission statement of the Earth System Science Partnership calls upon social scientists to develop 'strategies for earth system management'. Yet what such strategies might be, and how such strategies are to be developed, remains poorly understood in the social sciences.

On 1 December, the Netherlands Research School for Socio-Economic and Natural Sciences of the Environment (SENSE) organised a pre-conference on ´Sustainable Cities´ to present cutting-edge research from leading Dutch research groups, as well as from abroad.