Abstract:Some two dozen invitees convened at the headquarters of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) in Sweden for the International Workshop on Vulnerability and Global Environmental Change. With a set of key resources (distributed in advance of the workshop), this sterling assemblage of researchers, assessors, and practitioners formulated and addressed a series of core questions for five broad areas:
- Vulnerability, land use, and food security
- Vulnerability in environmental-security studies
- Hotspots and critical regions
- Conceptual approaches to vulnerability
- Cross-cutting research needs and priorities
For each of these topics, selected participants presented state-of-the-art overviews, thereby generating lively discussion and concluding with participants' best collective responses to each core question. Organizers of the workshop chose to avoid the usual "concepts-first, applications-next" mode in favor of an iterative process that commenced by exploring several substantive areas (such as land -use/cover change, food security), moving on to in-depth discussion of conceptual approaches, then returning to hotspots and critical regions, and finally revisiting the conceptual issues in a final wrap-up session on directions for future research.
The report is available electronically at http://www.sei.se/risk/workshop.html. For a printed copy, contact postmaster@sei.se or Publications, Stockholm Environment Institute, Box 2142 , S-103 14 Stockholm, SWEDEN. |