Programme | Thematic Schedule | Event Schedule | Parallel Sessions | Keynote Speakers | Social Events

Open Meeting
Thematic Programme

27 April - How do we deal with demographic challenges?

Though demographic challenges are in many ways synonymous with human dimensions research, they have not yet been explored fully or placed at the center of the Global Environmental Change research agenda. However, we can immediately understand the importance of research on demography by asking ourselves some of the following:

• What do we aim for in research on demography?

• What do we need to know about demographic challenges?

• What strategies do we need to put in place to get at the aims identified?

• How do we implement those changes that we need?

• How do we communicate them and educate people about them?

This day at the Open Meeting will discuss scientific approaches to demography and will include sessions related to:

• Interactions of demography with specific issue areas of global change such as health, urbanization, pollution and environmental degradation, resource uses, etc;

• The nature of demographic change and its drivers and impacts (e.g. modernization and economic integration processes, institutional frameworks, technology, and vulnerability of those affected, erosion of resilience as well as emergence of coping capacities in different societies);

• The influence and causes of perceptions and belief systems on demographic challenges (e.g. social learning processes, role of traditional and scientific knowledge, cognitive frames, behavioral patterns, values and ethics);

• Internal social feedbacks that impact demography and vice-versa (e.g. economic forces, power relations, gender, culture and religious beliefs, security, violence).

The day should be composed of an opening morning plenary and subsequent set of parallel sessions. The role of the plenary is both to introduce the different topics captured under this heading as well as linkages to the other main challenges of the 7th IHDP Open Meeting. It should also provide a platform for exchanges of insights and views stemming from science and the general public on one of the most central issues of humankind.

28 April - How do we deal with limitations of resources and ecosystem services?

Improving quality of life still means increasing resource consumption. Production patterns focus on increasing production and efficiency gains, but not on sustainability. Efficiency gains often are counteracted by rebound effects, and are limited by resource availability.

This day contains sessions that discuss the science of approaches to the human dimensions of resource limitations and ecosystem services in consumption and production. This includes challenges related to

• interactions of lifestyles, material fluxes, and climate change:

• What we can learn from the past in which traditional societies adapted to resource limitations

• understanding of resource limitations from perspectives of business practices

• developing methodologies, scenarios and storylines for innovative sustainable lifestyles

• mechanisms and opportunities for international and regional scale communication

• education, cognition and social learning related to ecosystem services

• policy making in relation to ecosystem services

The plenary should look to future innovative sustainable lifestyles.

29 April - How do we establish social cohesion while overcoming global inequity?

Moving toward sustainability requires a perspective of global social interdependence in order to foster global equity balanced with local social cohesion.

The elements subsumed under this include risk management, disaster prevention, a balanced allocation of public and private goods, the increase of adaptive capacities at all levels, the connection of the movement of labor with social welfare and security, the design of sustainable development pathways, the reconsideration of economic models for sufficiency, the re-design of the institutional framework of the flows of finance and goods, and the emergence of global ethics and values towards social cohesion and global equity.

30 April - How do we adapt institutions to address global change?

The day would begin with a plenary debate, looking at three elements of this theme: legal, academic, and institutional. There should also be a “practical” element to this discussion, meaning the inclusion of policy perspectives. This debate should give good ground for discussions during the rest of the day, with the possibility of a semi-plenary following the full plenary, as well as applicable parallel sessions.

A potential semi-plenary later that morning would have a focus on Asia, where the two levels of global trends and local realities coincide.

Issues for the plenaries and parallel sessions could include but not be limited to: regional perspectives on broader questions, ongoing experiments and experience, and methodological issues – such as how to design effective institutions, governance structures and strategies so that they have the capacity to change existing systems towards sustainable structure, regional institutional approach/ alliances/ networks, devolution/ decentralization processes in a broad context, as well as international agreements development pathways (particularly of China and India), and institutional conditions under which they can transform towards sustainability.