The 2014 Norwich Conference on Earth System Governance will be held on 1-3 July 2014 at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. This event is part of the annual conference series organized by the Earth System Governance Project. The conference will be co-hosted by the School of International Development, the School of Environmental Sciences and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
Further details as well as background information and updated information is available on the conference website: norwich2014.earthsystemgovernance.org.
Conference Themes
Theme 1: Access and Allocation of Resources (Water, Food, Energy, Health and Wellbeing, Forests and Carbon Rights)
Access and Allocation not only relates to material resources (e.g. water, forests) but also to the allocation and allocation of immaterial values such as rights, benefits, responsibilities and risks. Issues of access and allocation demand new answers in times of the Anthropocene, an era of human-dominated ecosystems. Such responses need to be interdisciplinary and reconcile with governance effectiveness. Conflicts about natural resources such as water, forests, food, energy and carbon are in essence questions related to the allocation of and access to these resources, and often linked to concepts of security, i.e. “food security” and “water security”.
Theme 2: Transformative Pathways to Sustainability
This theme is one of three themes under Future Earth and attempts to understand transformation processes and options across sectors and scales to identify strategies for the sustainable governance of the global environment and the relationship to human values, emerging technologies and economic paradigms. It will address the various blockages to these transformations and how to overcome them. This analysis will also involve new forms of localism and collective self-reliance at the scale of community across the whole planet.
Papers addressing the other analytical themes of architecture, agency, adaptiveness and accountability as well as methodological issues relevant for earth system governance research, the science-society interface and interdisciplinarity are also invited.
