‘Facing the Future’ of the environment
Published On Fri 4 Apr 2014 by Grant Hill
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have just warned that no one on the planet will be left unaffected by global warming and the University of Dundee will next month host an international conference looking for solutions to environmental change.
The ‘Facing the Future 2014’ symposium, taking place from 12th-14th May, is being organised by postgraduate students at the University’s Centre for Environmental Change and Human Resilience (CECHR).
The interdisciplinary event features contributions from international speakers and is open to PhD students and early career researchers from across the world.
Presentations, workshops and other components are organised around four key themes:
- Climate change mitigation and adaptation
- Pressures and changes that threaten food security
- Over-population reaching environmental tipping point
- Future scenarios of environmental change
CECHR Director John Rowan said, “This is a great opportunity for postgraduate students and early career researchers and we hope the event will build on the success of last year’s conference which attracted more than 100 delegates from across academic disciplines that are engaging in environmental research.
“Through an interdisciplinary discourse this symposium will tackle head on the most significant problems currently facing society. We aim to engage with the postgraduate and early career research community to forge the way forward and develop solutions to the problems around climate change pressures, food security, overpopulation and resource shortages.”
The IPCC’s fifth assessment report on the state of climate science attracted worldwide attention as it warned of “severe, pervasive and irreversible” impacts of climate change and outlined the challenges that humankind faces if it is to adapt to these changes.
CECHR is a joint initiative between the University and James Hutton Institute established in 2009 to provide a focus for novel interdisciplinary research addressing societal responses to environmental change and promoting sustainability.
It acts as a framework to bring expertise from different disciplines areas together to work on complicated issues in the hope of influencing policymakers by utilising the skill sets of specialists working across subjects such as Environment, Engineering, Law, Humanities, Computing, Life Sciences, and Business to tackle pressing global issues of food, water, energy and health futures.
The centre’s PhD community is known as XCECHR and provides important links between different part of the University and JHI.
‘Facing the Future 2014’ takes place at the University from 12-14th May.
For media enquiries contact:
Grant Hill
Press Officer
University of Dundee
Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4HN
Tel: +44 (0)1382 384768
Mobile: 07854 953277
Email: g.hill@dundee.ac.uk