Starting with the question: ‘To what extent are human societies adapting their capacity for learning and foresight to deal with new global challenges?’, the Resilience 2008 conference, the first major event focused on the notion resilience, aimed to be a space for bringing together scientists and professionals working with the complex dynamics of interconnected social-ecological systems...

In 2001, the four global change research programmes declared in their joint Amsterdam Declaration an ‘urgent need’ to develop ‘strategies for Earth System management’. Yet what such strategies might be, how they could be developed, and how effective, efficient and equitable they would be, remained unspecified. IHDP took up this challenge...

October 12 -15, 2008; New Dehli India
Deadline for Applications 25 May 2008

The third Bonn Dialogues, this time focusing on Biodiversity, will take place 6 May 2008. Following the outcomes of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report, biodiversity is the foundation for human well-being. While biodiversity provides the basis for ecosystems, their development, maintenance and stability, it also provides a wealth of services...

19-20 June 2008, Santa Barbara California
This workshop will open a dialogue among leading scholars in the field of energy, high-level government officials from around the world, prominent journalists, members of the business community and other stakeholders on the relationship between energy requirements, resources, security and the human behavioural patterns needed to move societies globally towards sustainability.

The IHDP executive director, Andreas Rechkemmer, along with scientific officers, Falk Schmidt, and new scientific committee member Ilan Chabay were in the United States from 5 to 14 March 2008. The mission aimed at discussing IHDP’s research and education plans and to strengthen existing ties, and building new relationships with some of the United States’ most prominent...

Thanks to the valuable input of leading experts in the field and generous sponsorship by the ESF, the Thinkshop on “Knowledge and Social Learning for Societal Change and Sustainability”, held on the 19-20 February 2008 at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB), became a huge success. IHDP’s cross-cutting theme on Knowledge and Social Learning was opened to a broad international and interdisciplinary audience to help developing the future research agenda for this new research programme.

On Tuesday evening, 21st February 2008, 7.00 pm, a public panel was held at the Akademie der Künste, in famous Pariser Platz in Berlin. The Panel discussion, under the same headline as the IHDP Thinkshop itself, represented the public start of the “Knowledge and Social Learning initiative” and built a bridge to the 2008 Berlin Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change