Themes

Special Theme: Effects of Climate Change on Biodiversity

Theme 1: The Evidence

• Paleoclimatolgy: the earth’s climate in a long view.
• Climate change today: examining the data.
• Ice cap reduction and glacial melt.
• Sea level change.
• Floods, drought, forest fires, hurricanes and other sporadic events.
• Albedo or measuring the earth’s reflectiveness.
• Meteorology and climate informatics
• Equilibria and disequilbria; change processes and countervailing tendencies.
• Climate measurement processes, methodologies and technologies.
• Reading complex, dynamic and unstable systems.
• Developing local and global climate models.
• Change scenarios: slow, rapid, abrupt or episodic.

Theme 2: Assessing Impacts in Divergent Ecosystems

• Ocean currents and el Niño.
• Riverine ecosystem impacts.
• Mountain ecosystem impacts.
• Coastal ecosystem impacts.
• Marine ecosystem impacts.
• Forest and grassland ecosystem impacts.
• Impacts on wilderness and protected areas.
• Impacts on specific biomes.
• Impacts on biodiversity, potential extinctions.
• Hardiness zone migration.
• Regional variations: temperature and rainfall.

Theme 3: Human Impacts and Impacts on Humans

• Anthropogengic factors in climate change: determining the relative contribution of natural and human causes.
• Impacts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
• Land use patterns, agriculture and livestock husbandry and deforestation as factors in climate change.
• Impacts on humans: agriculture, fish stocks, food supply, health.
• Human settlements and sea level rise.
• Impacts on humans: water supply, desertification.
• Impacts on humans of intense weather events, natural disasters and ecological surprises.
• Impacts of climate change in the developing world.

Theme 4: Framing Responses

• Environmental policies in response to climate change.
• Controversy and denial: politics, the media and scientists with dissenting views.
• Education and awareness for management of global climate change.
• Protected areas and preservation of biodiversity: ‘corridoring’ and other strategies.
• Strategies for sustainability.
• Human adaptive strategies.
• Technologies of mitigation: carbon dioxide sequestration, solar shades and other processes.
• Alternative and renewable energy sources: technologies, policies and strategies.
• Carbon taxes and offsets.
• Climate ethics and the precautionary principle.
• Eco-development, eco-efficiency.
• Emission standards.
• Kyoto and beyond.
• The economics of climate change and its mitigation.