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New dates announced for major London international conference: Planet under pressure

26-29 March 2012

A  major global-change open science conference will be held 26-29 March 2012 in London (Excel centre). The conference, which will focus on solutions, is co-sponsored by the International Council for Science's (ICSU) global-environmental-change research programmes and their Earth System Science Partnership. It is expected to bring together natural and social scientists, economists, national and international policymakers, industry, NGOs and many other communities.

New dates have been announced to accommodate the Earth Summit, Rio +20, also scheduled for 2012.

In the UK, the conference will be hosted by the Royal Society, the Living With Environmental Change programme (LWEC, which represents all the UK's main agencies and government departments tackling environmental change) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the UK's largest funder of environmental science.

Elinor Ostrom (winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics), Lidia Brita (UNESCO's Director of Science Policy and Sustainable Development) and Mark Stafford Smith (Science Director of the Climate Adaptation Flagship of CSIRO) will lead the Scientific Organising Committee for the conference. The full committee will be announced shortly.

A conference website will be launched soon.

Non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gases conference: call for papers

Science, policy and intergration conference, Amsterdam 2-4 November 2011

Non-CO₂ gases and particles for example, methane, nitrous oxide, fluorocarbons, black carbon, aerosols and tropospheric ozone, contribute significantly to climate forcing. Reducing emissions of these gases and particles is often more cost-effective than reducing CO₂ emissions. This has led to a growing interest in effective management of these emissions. IGBP and others are co-sponsoring a science/policy conference to discuss these issues in November 2011. The call for papers is now open.  http://www.ncgg.info/

Humanity needs to take a "Giant Leap"

IGBP director of communications, Owen Gaffney, discusses the International Council for Science's proposed vision for Earth System Science on the BBC's Green Room.

Temperate ecosystems may be more vulnerable to climate change than previously thought.

Using measurements from the FLUXNET global network, an international team has quantified more precisely the gas exchange related to photosynthesis between atmosphere and terrestrial ecosystems. The research was published online in the journal Science, 5 July 2010.

According to researchers from the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, France, who contributed to the work, the results show that temperate ecosystems, which include large areas of cropland, may be more vulnerable to climate change than previously expected, while tropical regions may be more robust.

Terrestrial Gross Carbon Dioxide Uptake: Global Distribution and Covariation with Climate

Seeking Executive Officer for IGAC

The International Global Atmospheric Chemistry Project (IGAC; http://www.igac.noaa.gov), a core project of IGBP, is seeking to hire a new Executive Officer. This position is with the University of Washington's Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO), a cooperative research institute between UW and NOAA.  The incumbent will work at the JISAO facility on the University of Washington campus (Wallace Hall) in Seattle.

Click here for more information.

UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change selects 62 members of the IGBP community for next report

The IPCC has published the names of coordinating lead authors, lead authors and reviewers for its Fifth Assessment Report due to be published in 2014. Sixty two experts from the IGBP community - scientific steering committees, national committees, networks - have been selected as authors or reviewers. The IGBP community will contibute to all three IPCC working groups. For a complete list of authors see the IPCC website.

Ocean acidification, IGBP's climate change index, planetary boundaries and IPCC mistakes discussed at UNFCCC meeting in Bonn.

Webcast of presentations from the international global-change programmes at the UNFCCC talks in Bonn, yesterday. IGBP director, Sybil Seitzinger, discusses ocean acidification. Rik Leemans from the Earth System Science Parntership discusses mistakes in the IPCC report, the planetary boundaries concept and the IGBP climate change index.