The International Scientific Planning Committee is pleased to announce:

1999 OPEN MEETING OF THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS
OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE RESEARCH COMMUNITY
(First Announcement)


Japanese Page

June 2426, 1999
Shonan Village*, Kanagawa, Japan

An increasing number of researchers are interested in the human causes and impacts of global environmental change, as well as recognizing that local and regional scales are critical for their studies. Following two successful international meetings held at Duke University in 1995 and at IIASA in 1997, the 1999 Open Meeting aims to promote exchanges of information on current research and teaching and to encourage networking and community building in this emerging field. The meeting, organized and sponsored by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES, Japan), the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN) and the Environment Agency of Japan, will be held in Shonan Village, an international conference center in a scenic setting south~west of Tokyo.

Plenary talks and commentaries on the following topics are planned: Conflict and the Environment - the interaction between conflict prevention and resolution and environmental issues; Lifestyles, Attitudes and Behavior - their role in driving global environmental change and the potential role of alternative development paths; Decision-making Processes in Response to Global Environmental Change - in particular the linkages between the international, national and local scales and the obstacles to the transfer of policy instruments and norms from one region to another; Land Use and Land Cover Change - the social dimensions of changing land use, human settlements and land cover patterns; Valuation of Ecosystem Services - current thinking on the values that can be attributed to services such as climate regulation, water supply and recreation; Demographic Change and the Environment - the relationships between population growth and other demographic factors, for example migration, and environmental change.

In addition to plenary talks, there will be a large number of sessions devoted to the presentation of research results. The International Scientific Planning Committee welcomes the submission of abstracts for individual papers as well as proposals for entire sessions. Selection of the proposals/abstracts will be based on quality and the need to create a coherent, balanced meeting agenda. The Committee encourages the participation of researchers from a broad range of disciplines, including researchers from developing countries and countries with economies in transition, as well as young researchers from all over the world. For these latter categories of researchers, the aim is to provide financial support for some participants whose abstracts are selected for the meeting.

For further information on the meeting, including instructions for the submission of abstracts, please consult the IGES Web Site ( http://www.iges.or.jp/ ), or send an e-mail to hdgec@iges.or.jp, or mail/fax your inquiry to Mr. Yasushi Itoh, IGES at Shonan Village Center. (Fax: +81 468 55 3709).
The deadline for submission of abstracts is November 1, 1998.

*The official address of Shonan Village is 1560-39, Kami-yamaguchi, Hayama, Kanagawa 240-0115, Japan

Vol8.10.