IHDP - International Human Dimensions Programme
The IHDP on Global Environmental Change works toward understanding and addressing the effects of individuals and societies on global environmental change, and how such global changes, in turn, affect humans. By integrating humans into the debate on global environmental change, IHDP addresses some of the most poignant, and widespread challenges of our day. It is a producer of new knowledge that can flow into the work of scientific assessments from other organisations and enhance their ability to answer critical questions of interest to the policy world.
IHDP’s Mission
- Foster, coordinate, and conduct social science research that helps to understand and address the challenges of global environmental change and improve societal responses.
- Contribute to the interdisciplinary attempts, including both natural and social sciences, to understand the interactions of humans with the natural environment that cause global environmental change,
- Strengthen the capacities of research and policy communities toward a shared understanding of the social causes and implications of global changes.
- Facilitate the dialogue between science and policy.
IHDP's Activities
IHDP’s activities focus on three principal areas: (1) developing and sustaining innovative research, (2) developing world-wide capacity to understand and deal with these challenges, and (3) enhancing interaction between scientists and policy makers on these topics.
IHDP core science project focus on
- the Earth System Governance (ESG): This project defines earth system governance as the interrelated and increasingly integrated system of formal and informal rules, rule-making systems, and actor-networks at all levels of human society (from local to global) that are built up to guide societies towards preventing, mitigating, and adapting to global and local environmental change.
- Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS): The primary research question is “What are the relationships between global environmental change and human security?”. Answering this question involves the need to focus on issues of perception, adaptation, vulnerability, interaction, response, and thresholds.
- the Global Land (GLP): This project (co-sponsored with IGBP) focuses on the interactions of people, biota, and natural resources of terrestrial and aquatic systems.
- the Industrial Transformation (IT): This 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.
- Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ): This project (co-sponsored with IGBP) studies Earth's heterogeneous, relatively small but highly productive, dynamic and sensitive coastal zone.
- Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC): The specific focus of this project lies 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.
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Contact
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Anantha Duraiappah IHDP Secretariat United Nations University UN Campus Hermann-Ehlers-Str. 10 53113 Bonn Germany Phone +49 (0)2 28 815 06 00 |
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