About the Conference

The Fourth Assessment (AR4) of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has served to catalyze government leaders around the globe to take seriously the existing scientific information about human impacts on the naturally occurring greenhouse effect. Each assessment has shown that the effects are growing, and that now societies must take action to deal with a warmer climate.

Undergraduates around the globe will be entering the workforce in the very near future. It is imperative that they have the tools available to them in order to enable them to become fully conversant about global warming and its impacts on ecosystems and societies.

Coping with climate change and its impacts requires, indeed demands, that decision makers, gatekeepers, and stakeholders draw their expertise from a wide range of fields, from science to policy to ethics & equity. As American ecologist Barry Commoner once said, "you cannot do just one thing" (in other words, things are interconnected).

Most climate, water or weather related environmental changes in which human activities are involved --- deforestation, desertification, biodiversity loss, wetland destruction, water shortages, greenhouse gas emissions --- are of the creeping (incremental) kind. They accumulate over time, eventually ending as a major environmental change and crisis for decision makers. Policy makers around the world have difficulty coping with creeping problems until those problems develop into full-blown crises, partly because there are no clearly identified thresholds of change and partly because there are uncertainties surrounding the science of environmental change.

It is important that students, regardless of their disciplinary training, learn about global warming, its potential direct and indirect impacts and societal responses to them.

This conference aims to help undergraduates to understand their role in civil society in dealing with global, regional, and local climate change, variability and extremes. The key question is how to cope with variability, extremes, and change in climate, water, weather, and societal interactions.

The conference organizers expect to have the student participants leave the Shanghai conference with an enhanced skill set as well as a passion for engaging in lifelong dialogue about climate, water, weather and society sensitive issues.