Joint German-American Conference on Land Use and Climate Change

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Although global in origin, climate-change impacts vary strongly across regions. Coping with these changes therefore requires local action in an internationally coordinated way that acknowledges inequities in impacts regionally and locally. Awareness is growing of the need for a portfolio of mitigation options that local regions can use to develop effective strategies for reducing energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, to increase the efficiency of energy use, and to store consumed carbon and make energy production sustainable. Furthermore, organizations, communities, and regions need to identify opportunities to reduce their vulnerability to climate-change impacts and increase their capacity to adapt their land-use and livelihood strategies to the changing climate. In this context, land resources like the biosphere, soils, and water and their interaction with people and the climate system play an increasingly important role. Although limited in its areal extent, land resources are an important component of the global carbon cycle, and they can be used to produce renewable energy and to sequester carbon. This potential, however, is constrained by existing demands on land resources to provide for human settlement, food and fiber production, and other ecosystem services like maintenance of water quality. To address these topics and bring together the complementary expertise of U.S. and German scientists, this award will support the participation of U.S. scientists in a binational conference on the challenges of understanding and managing land-use dynamics under a changing climate. The conference is to be held in Berlin, Germany, in early October 2008. The conference will bring together 35 scholars from United States with about 100 from Germany to discuss the current state of the art in land-change science as it relates to climate change, to identify priorities for research, to provide opportunities for participation of young scholars, and to develop new collaborations between U.S. and Germany-based scientists.This project will help facilitate greater scientific understanding of the complex interactions among people and land resources in the face of climatic change. It will facilitate international collaboration between U.S. and German scholars. Because roughly half of the U.S. participants will be at early stages in their professional careers, the long-term potential for future international collaborative findings is especially great. The project also will advance understanding of the complex dynamics between land resources and climate change, thereby fostering more effective strategies for mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change in a range of different terrestrial environments.