Port-Louis
Mauritius
Fifth international conference on climate change: Impacts and responses
Organizer(s)
Common Ground Publishing
Date
-
Theme 1: Scientific evidence
What is evidence is there of climate change?
- Paleoclimatology: 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
What are the impacts of climate change on natural environments?
- 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
What evidence is there that human activity has contributed to climate change, and what are the impacts of climate change on human life?
- Anthropogenic 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: Technical, political and social responses
How do scientists, technologies, policy makers and community members respond to climate change?
- Environmental policies in response to climate change
- Controversy and denial: Politics, the media and scientists with dissenting views
- The international politics of climate change
- The past, present and future of international agreements
- 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, offsets and trading
- Emission standards
- Climate ethics and the precautionary principle
- Eco-development, eco-efficiency