El Programa Científico del IHDP tiene los siguientes proyectos núcleos de investigación.

Estos son el mecanismo conducente para:

• Generar nuevas actividades de la investigación en áreas prioritarias.
• Promover la cooperación internacional
• Conectar a los investigadores con los tomadores de decisiones.

 Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS)

 What are the relationships between global environmental change and human security? This is the primary research question posed by the GECHS project. Answering this question involves the need to focus on issues of perception, adaptation, vulnerability, interaction, response, and thresholds.

 Research areas include conceptual and theoretical issues, resource use such as conflicts around water, and how population issues relate to both global environmental change and human security. One objective is to encourage the collaboration of scholars internationally, another to facilitate improved communication and cooperation between the policy community, user groups and the research community. To the latter end, a regular policy bulletin, AVISO, is published and spread broadly.

 For more information on the GECHS Project go to: www.gechs.org

  

Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC)

 Institutions are systems of rules, decision-making processes and programs that give rise to social practices, assign roles to the participants and guide their initial interactions.

 IDGEC"s research agenda centers on the examination of the role of social institutions in causing, exacerbating and solving large-scale environmental problems.

The analysis looks particularly closely at concepts of institutional fit, interplay, and issues of scale.

 The core activities of IDGEC circle around three themes: ocean governance, forest use and carbon management; the circumpolar North and Southeast Asia are regional foci.

For more information on the IDGEC Programs go to:http://fiesta.bren.ucsb.edu/~idgec

 Industrial Transformation (IT)

The IT Project is an international, multi-disciplinary research initiative aimed at understanding complex society-environment interactions; identifying driving forces for change; and exploring development trajectories that have a significantly smaller burden on the environment on a global scale.

IT research is based on the assumption that important changes in production and consumption systems will be required in order to meet the needs and aspirations of a growing world population while using environmental resources in a sustainable manner.

Through its five key research foci on energy and material flows, food, cities, information and communication, and governance and transformation processes, IT research aims at building on the foundations of different disciplinary research approaches in the social, technical and natural sciences.

 For more information on the IT Project please click: www.ihdp-it.org

  

Land-Use and Land-Cover Change (LUCC)

 LUCC, a joint project of IHDP and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), completed its research activities in late 2005. The newly founded Global Land Project (GLP) is regarded as LUCC"s follow-up project, and will develop further much of LUCC-related research.

 LUCC"s interdisciplinary research agenda has been implemented through case studies, development of models and integrative analyses.

 Climate change, food production, health, urbanization, coastal zone management, transboundary migration, and availability and quality of water are addressed in LUCC"s research, and their impacts on the quality of human life are investigated.

 LUCC studies and documents temporal and geographical dynamics of land-use and land-cover. Links are defined between sustainability and various land uses. The project aims to understand the interrelationship between LUCC, biogeochemistry and climate.

 For more information on the LUCC Project click:

www.geo.ucl.ac.be/LUCC/lucc.html

 

Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ)

 LOICZ is the newest research project sponsored by IGBP and IHDP. It studies the world’s coastal zones as heterogenous, relatively small but highly productive, dynamic and sensitive systems that provide a significant proportion of the life support systems of most societies.

 The Earth’s coastal zones are one of the study areas where changes in various components of the Earth system affecting and altering their role in global cycles have been observed. It has become clear that irrespective of the improved knowledge on coastal system metabolism, the understanding of the complex interactions between society and environment in coastal zones under global environmental pressures is still limited. Consequently, the “New” LOICZ aims to provide an integrated framework to address the primary issues of sustainable human use of coastal systems with vulnerability of coasts and risks for human uses playing a key role.

 The “New” LOICZ will examine to a much greater extent the linkages amongst various sectors and regimes in the coastal zone rather than viewing each sector and regime in isolation. Furthermore, an important underlying principle of the “New” LOICZ is to continuously engage in a “science-policy-public” dialogue addressing scientific information needs as well as human development and implementation issues.

 Main Research Foci:

• Vulnerability of coastal systems and hazards to human societies sets the stage for the sub sequent themes that address special parts of the wider coastal domain.
• Implications of global change and land- and sea-use on coastal development focuses on spatial, temporal and organizational issues of how change in land- and sea-use influence natural resources availability and natural systems sustainability.
• Anthropogenic influences on the river catchment and coastal zone interaction address river catchment-based drivers/pressures that influence and change the coastal domain.
• Fate and transformation of materials in coastal and shelf waters focus on the cycling of carbon, nutrients and sediments in the coastal and shelf waters and their exchange with the ocean.
• Towards coastal system sustainability by managing land-ocean interactions provides an ovearching integration cutting across the four other themes.

 For more information on the LOICZ Project click: www.loicz.org

 Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC)

 Urban areas are complex and dynamic systems that reproduce within their territory the interactions among socio-economic, geopolitical, and environmental processes on a local, regional, and global scale. The interactions of urban areas with global environmental change are bi-directional with a large proportion of the human impact on these changes originating in urban areas but its consequences in turn having severe effects on urban areas and the urban poor in particular. The specific aspects, however, have been understudied, particularly the latter one. The specific focus of this new Urbanization Project will be on understanding the nature of the interactions between global environmental change and urban processes, the direction, rate, intensity and scale of these processes as well as the challenge of global environmental change to the functioning, stability and sustainability of urban areas.

Main Research Foci:

• Urban processes that contribute to global environmental change.
• This section includes questions on lifestyle and consumption patterns, urban land use and land cover change as well as effects of social and biophysical “teleconnections”.
• Pathways through which global environmental change affects the urban system.
• This section explores the consequences of global environmental changes on human behaviour and interactions, their contribution to shaping the built environment and their impact on the resource base upon which urban systems rely.
• Interactions and responses within the urban system.
• This section poses questions on how interactions between the human and the physical systems shape the impact of and the responses to global environmental change as well as their consequences for urban livelihoods.
• Consequences of interactions within urban systems on global environmental change.

 You will find information on the UGEC Project at: www.ugec.org

 Global Land Project (GLP)

 The Global Land Project (GLP) is the successor of the jointly sponsored IGBP/IHDP core project LUCC (to finish 10/05) and the IGBP core project on Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems (GCTE, closed 11/03). The Global Land Project will focus on the interactions of people, biota, and natural resources of terrestrial and aquatic systems.

 The Science Plan emphasizes the study of changes in the coupled human-environmental system at local to regional scales. Changes in coupled human-environmental systems also affect the rates of cycling of energy, water, elements, and biota at the global level, while global-level changes in political economy, such as international treaties and market liberalization, in turn affect decisions about resources at local and regional levels.

 The research goal of GLP is to measure, model and understand the coupled human-environmental system (“land system”) as part of broader efforts to address changes in Earth processes and subsequent social, economic and political consequences.

 Information regarding GLP Project can be found at: www.globallandproject.org.

 

Crosscutting Questions

 IHDP’s core research projects are linked by four crosscutting themes, which crystallize key aspects of human dimensions research

 Vulnerability/Resilience/Adaptation

What factors determine the capacity of coupled human-environment systems to endure and produce sustainable outcomes in the face of social and biophysical change?

 Thresholds/Transitions

How can we recognize long-term trends in forcing functions and ensure orderly transitions when thresholds are passed?

 Governance

How can we steer tightly coupled systems towards desired goals or away from undesired outcomes?

 Social Learning/Knowledge

How can we stimulate social learning in the interest of managing the dynamics of tightly coupled systems?