19 December 2011

Seventeen ECI led papers/posters and four convened sessions have been accepted for the Planet Under Pressure conference.

ECI is pleased to announce that we have been widely successful in our response to the call for this cutting edge conference, due to take place in London during March 2012. The global science conference will focus on solutions to the global sustainability challenge and provide a comprehensive update of the pressure planet Earth is now under. The conference will discuss solutions at all scales to move societies on to a sustainable pathway. It will provide scientific leadership towards the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development - Rio+20.

The acceptance of so many sessions by to be led by ECI researchers highlights the relevance of our research to the sustainability challenge and the range of disciplines we will present emphasises our diverse expertise. The accepted sessions are as follows :

• Risk and opportunity in urban coasts
  Professor Jim Hall
• Sustainable infrastructure systems: energy, water, transport, waste and digital communications
  Professor Jim Hall [Convenor]
• Novel Multi-sector Networks and Entrepreneurship in Urban Climate Governance
  Dr Heike Schroeder [Convenor], Dr Sarah Burch
• Convergent global megatrends: interdependent processes and policy responses
  Professor Jim Hall [Convenor], Dr Jimin Zhao
• Urban governance challenges for sustainability and global environmental change
  Dr Heike Schroeder
• Resilient Communities: local pathways to meet the energy, climate, and resource depletion challenges
  Jo Hamilton [Convenor], Dr Yael Parag, Philip Mann

The following oral and poster presentations have been accepted:

Oral Presentations

• Multi-sectoral pathways to sustainable national infrastructure
  Professor Jim Hall
• Examining the opportunities and limits of partipatory, community-based disaster management and reconstruction: a case study from a tsunami-affected village in Sri Lanka
  Dr Kamal Kapadia
• Understanding and modelling indirect impacts of heatwaves in London
  Katie Jenkins
• Participatory scenario development as a tool for spanning boundaries between disciplines, sectors and system levels
  Abrar Chaudhury
• We’re All In This Together: Shifting Paradigms on Science and Society in a Shifting Global Landscape
  Ariella Helfgott
• Novel multi-sector networks and entrepreneurship (NMNE) in Metro Vancouver and London: a comparative study of small businesses as emerging non-state actors in urban climate change mitigation
  Sarah Burch
• Biodiversity change in relation to human adaptation
  Dr Thomas Thornton
• Simulating climate change impacts on Amazonian rainforests: moving beyond quantification of uncertainty
  Dr David Galbraith
• Protected area effectiveness in reducing deforestation, in the eastern arc mountains, Tanzania.
  Cecilia Larrosa

Poster Presentations

• The CLIMSAVE Integrated Assessment Platform: A tool to build the capacity of decision-makers to adapt to climate change
  Dr Paula Harrison
• Evidence that deforestation delays the onset of the rainy season in Rodonia, Brazil.
  Dr Nathalie Butt
• Cultural models of wellbeing in relation to forest ecosystems, biomass energy, and sustainable development: lessons from northern indigenous frontiers
  Dr Thomas Thorton
• A middle-out framework for analysis and action: the transition to low carbon cities
  Dr Katie Janda
• Adaptation to hydroclimatic risk in federal systems
  Dr Dustin Garrick
• Prospects for a tropical forest tipping point and how to avoid it
  Professor Yadvinder Malhi
• Scenarios and visioning as complementary methods to build capacity for governance in the face of environmental and socio-economic uncertainty
  Joost Vervoort
• Operationalising equity in national legal frameworks for REDD+: the case of Indonesia
  Dr Claudia Ituarte-Lima

Full details of the conference are available on the Planet Under Pressure website.