Sunday, March 08, 2009

Financial Crisis and Climate Policy - conference

From the inbox.

It is good idea to bring together scientists from different areas to discuss the financial crisis and climate change. This is likely to be an interesting conference although I am not sure all bases are covered.

Financial Crisis and Climate Policy
A Science-Policy Debate


April 4, 2009
Ca' Foscari University - Venice, Italy

The European Climate Forum (ECF - http://ecf.pik-potsdam.de/) and the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM - http://www.feem.it/) are pleased to announce the International Conference on “Financial Crisis and Climate Policy”, to be held on April 4th, 2009, at Ca' Foscari University (Mario Baratto Room), Venice, Italy. The conference has been organised in collaboration with the European Centre for Living Technology (ECLT - http://www.ecltech.org/).

"Europe must lead the world into a new, or maybe one should say, post-industrial revolution, the development of a low-carbon economy". This is the perspective offered by EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso when the EU declared its ambitious goals for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, increasing renewable energy use, and improving energy efficiency. In summer 2007, this step enabled the G-8 summit of Heiligendamm to declare the aim to halve global CO2 emissions by 2050, and at the end of the year, it kept the momentum in the global climate policy process at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali.

A year later, however, the biggest financial crisis since 1929 hit the world. That crisis made painfully clear how unsustainable the financial boom of the past decades had been. But the perspective of sustainable development has been largely absent in the haphazard way different European nations have tried to counter a global financial crisis that will shape the 21st century.

The possibility of this crisis had not been anticipated by the sophisticated computer models run by major central banks and leading institutions of economic research. And the scientists working on the risks of climate change and the options for climate policy had not taken such a possibility in consideration either.

It looks like both scientists and policy-makers have some homework to do. The science-policy debate organized by the European Climate Forum and the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei aims to identify the tasks that need to be tackled and the means needed to do so.

Four distinguished panelists will look at the problem from four different perspectives: climate research, economic research, business, and the study of complex systems. With that background, researchers and stakeholders from a variety of fields are invited to engage in an open discussion. Main findings of the debate will be fed into the EU conference “Sustainable Development: A Challenge for European Research” that will take place on May 26-28 in Brussels.


Agenda

Saturday, April 4

9:00 Welcome
Prof. Klaus Hasselmann, Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany

9:15 Science and Policy: Dialogue of the Deaf?
Prof. Antonio Navarra, Director of Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC), Bologna, Italy

9:45 What lessons from the financial crisis for climate policy?
Prof. Carlo Carraro, Director of the FEEM Sustainable Development Programme, University of Venice, CMCC, Venice, Italy

10:15 What Lessons from Climate Policy for the Financial Crisis?
Prof. Peter Hoeppe, Head of Munich Re's Geo Risks Research/ Corporate Climate Centre, Munich, Germany

10:45 Navigating Complexity: Financial Crisis and Climate Policy
Dr. John Finnigan, Director of the CSIRO Centre for Complex Systems Science, Canberra, Australia

11:15 Coffee break

11:30 Open Debate: Challenges for Research
Moderated by Prof. Carlo Jaeger, Chairman ECF

13:30 Lunch

This public debate follows a technical workshop on Agent-Based Modeling for Sustainable Development documented in the attached file. If you are interested in the workshop, please check the corresponding box on the registration form.

Contacts:
Aida Abdulah
European Climate Forum
E-mail: aida@european-climate-forum.net

.

No comments: