IHDP Research

IHDP has an international set of thousands of scientists in its network, drawing on expertise from high-level institutions all over the world. IHDP welcomes a wide-array of disciplines from within the social sciences and explicitly builds bridges between the natural and social sciences on issues of global environmental change. IHDP tackles global environmental change issues that are critical to both science and policy and produces cutting-edge research that is directly relevant to current policy debates at numerous political levels.


Science Policy Dialogue

Scientists from the IHDP network find it professionally interesting to think systematically about the science-policy interaction, one of IHDP’s pillars. For them it is a rich field for research instead of a frustrating exercise that has to complement “real” research activities.

Over its first ten years, IHDP has continuously increased its proportion of network members who work with and within policy and practice communities, serving as intermediaries or “knowledge brokers” facilitating science-practice dialogues.


Ask an Expert

IHDP Secretariat has invited some of them to become a part of our pilot Ask an Expert experience, aiming at facilitating communication among journalists, researchers and academics. Through our contact list, decision makers will be able to find out how an expert can help them make the right decision within the field of global environmental change. Visitors will have the option to find researchers who can help with their query, searching by keyword, surname, language spoken or project/institution.

While IHDP core and joint projects' researchers will do their best to respond quickly and helpfully, some academics or researchers may not be immediately available or may have to decline some interview requests. We therefore ask that journalists and visitors in general bear in mind that researcher may not always be available and that delays in response time may occur. While the "Ask an Expert" section is still under construction, we have discovered that it is already one of he most visited options in the IHDP webpage!


Our Experts’ Research

IHDP’s experts work on any of IHDP’s three distinct elements: (1) core projects – including several projects sponsored jointly with IGBP - organized around substantive themes such as human security or urbanization, (2) collaborative projects initiated as part of the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) and, (3) crosscutting themes dealing with issues that are relevant to a number of projects and are of particular interest to members of the IHDP Scientific Committee.

These programmatic activities have evolved, for the most part, independently. The core projects have developed along lines similar to IGBP and World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) projects. In its early years, IHDP invested the bulk of its resources in efforts to get cutting-edge core projects up and running.

By 2000, four projects were in operation (LUCC, IDGEC, IT, and GECHS). Since then, the Programme has initiated one new core project of its own, Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC), and two new projects sponsored jointly with IGBP, the Global Land Project (GLP) and the new Land/Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone Project (LOICZ).

Equally important is the fact that several of IHDP’s original core projects have completed their lifecycles and gone through successful synthesis processes. LUCC has formally completed its research program and has produced a synthesis volume. Th LUCC legacy continues, however, and a number of the LUCC research themes are being carried forward under the auspices of the GLP. IDGEC has held a major synthesis conference, which will lead to the publication of a synthesis volume in the near future. The central concerns of IDGEC are topics of continuing interest within the human dimensions community and will be continued in the form of crosscutting concerns.

The ESSP projects (the Global Carbon Project (GCP), the Global Environmental Change and Food Systems Project (GECAFS), the Global Water System Project (GWSP), and the Global Environmental Change and Human Health Project (GECHH)) emerged from a conviction articulated clearly in the 2001 Amsterdam Declaration and reaffirmed in Beijing in 2006 that coming to terms with the challenges of life in the Anthropocene will require a major increase in the time and energy devoted to the analysis of complex and dynamic socio-ecological systems. There is no doubt that this conviction is well-founded, and efforts to drive these projects forward under the auspices of ESSP have begun to bear fruit.


How to get involved

We would like to invite you to contact our Communications Team (experts@ihdp.unu.edu) if you would like to have your project or institution included or if you need to update your entry.


To Contact any of the experts please send your question, the expert you wish to speak with, and affiliation to