CID Occasional Speaker Series on Research Topics in Sustainable Development :: The Environmental Dimension of Human Vulnerability – Results from Europe, Thoughts on Haiti, with Dagmar Schroeter

Occasional Speaker Series on Research Topics in Sustainable Development

"The Environmental Dimension of Human Vulnerability – Results from Europe, Thoughts on Haiti"

Speaker: Dagmar Schroeter, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Science, Environment and Development Group

Hosted by Prof. William Clark, Science, Environment and Development Group

Tuesday, 10 May 2005
10:00 - 11:30 am
Location: Perkins Room, 4th Floor Rubenstein Building (formerly One Eliot Building), Center for International Development, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Abstract:

Over the next decades society will increasingly be confronted with the environmental impacts of global change. Such impacts include changes in the supply of ecosystem services vital for human well-being. A European study based on multiple, internally consistent scenarios of climate and land use change, a range of ecosystem models, a generic adaptive capacity index and a continuous stakeholder dialogue shows that decreased ecosystem services supply is likely to increase Europe’s vulnerability to global changes in the 21st century. In this presentation the speaker will focus on the main conclusions of this assessment and the usefulness of its final product, a digital atlas of results, for stakeholders. She will furthermore present first ideas and findings on a case study of Haiti that applies the same concepts of ecosystem service and vulnerability.

Biography:

Dagmar Schröter is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Development (CID). Her research interests are global change vulnerability assessment, ecosystem analysis and modeling with a focus on soil food webs and the carbon and nitrogen cycle, and the link between ecosystem services and human well-being. Her research aims at using ecological understanding in transdisciplinary dialogues to promote sustainable management of the human-environment system. She was scientific co-ordinator of the European Vulnerability Assessment Project - ATEAM (Advanced Terrestrial Ecosystem Analysis and Modelling) at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Department of Global Change and Natural Systems. She completed her PhD dissertation on the structure and functioning of food webs in soil ecosystems in 2001 at Giessen University, Department of Animal Ecology (Germany) combining field research and numerical modeling.

Background Documents:

Schroeter, Dagmar, Marc J. Metzger, Wolfgang Cramer, and Rik Leemans. 2004. "Vulnerability Assessment - Analysing the Human-Environment System in the Face of Global Environmental Change." Environmental Science Section Bulletin 2:11-17.

Schroeter, Dagmar, Colin Polsky, and Anthony G. Patt. 2005 (in press). "Assessing Vulnerabilities to the Effects of Global Change: An Eight Step Approach." Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change.

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