USAID Adaptation Community Meeting: Future Earth Introduction and Overview

You are invited to this month's USAID Adaptation Community meeting organized by the Climate Change Resilient Development (CCRD) project.
 
For our discussion this month, Dennis Ojima (Acting US Future Earth Secretariat Global Hub Director, Colorado State University) and Jason Neff (US Future Earth Secretariat Global Hub Associate Director, University of Colorado) will present on the Future Earth initiative. Future Earth is a 10 year research initiative with the goal to meet the mounting challenges of global environmental change and the transition to global sustainability by harnessing the capacity of the global research community across multiple disciplines and engaging with a wide array of stakeholders. Future Earth intends to operate at the cutting edge of the science-policy interface while training the next generation of integrated thinkers and doers on global sustainability and human wellbeing, particularly in developing countries.
 
Click here to watch the webinar recording from September 18, 2014. 
 

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Future Earth: Research Pathways Toward Global Development
Future Earth is a 10 year research initiative with the goal to meet the mounting challenges of global environmental change and the transition to global sustainability by harnessing the capacity of the global research community across multiple disciplines and engaging with a wide array of stakeholders. Future Earth intends to operate at the cutting edge of the science-policy interface while training the next generation of integrated thinkers and doers on global sustainability and human wellbeing, particularly in developing countries. Sustainability challenges are global in scope, but vary with regional social and environmental conditions.  For this reason, the Future Earth Secretariat must represent the global community and work effectively at multiple scales. In order to provide regional flexibility and legitimacy, buffer the risks of a single point of failure, and maximize the ability to engage stakeholders and funders, we are developing a decentralized but strongly coordinated structure for the Future Earth Secretariat.
 
Future Earth will be managed by a novel, internationally distributed secretariat spanning the globe and providing a platform for co-design, co-production, and co-delivery of knowledge to support research on the earth system, global development and transformation toward sustainability. Our vision for the Secretariat is simple yet daunting:  to catalyze major improvements in the world’s ability to solve our most pressing environmental and development challenges. This vision is embedded in Future Earth’s priorities: solution-oriented research, interdisciplinary collaborations, rapid dissemination of information to policy makers, broad participation and increased capacity building. The Future Earth secretariat has an innovative structure consisting of five initial global hubs functioning as a single entity; these hubs are located in Canada, Japan, France, Sweden, and the United States. The secretariat’s reach is extended through a set of regional hubs covering Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Asia, with the potential to expand to additional areas. Over the coming years, Future Earth will support and enable the implementation of knowledge sharing between research and stakeholder communities with a particular focus on building new ties between development professionals and the sustainability research community.
 
Speaker bios
Dennis Ojima, Acting US Future Earth Secretariat Global Hub Director
Dr. Dennis Ojima is a Professor, Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability; Senior Research Scientist, Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University; and University Director of the North Central Climate Science Center at Colorado State University for the Department of Interior. His research area involves application of social ecological system approaches to climate and land use changes on ecosystems around the world, carbon accounting, and adaptation and mitigation strategies to climate change. He is an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow since 1999, is serving on the National Research Council Board on Environmental Change and Society, and was Resident Senior Scholar at the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment in Washington, DC. He co-led the development of the Global Land Project (2001-2005) and co-chaired the GLP from 2005 thru 2006). He has been recognized for his international contributions in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment receiving which received the 2005 Zayed International Prize for the Environment and the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2013 was honored as a Champion of the Environment by the Mongolian Minister of the Environment and Green Development. Professor Ojima received his BA and Master’s Degrees in Botany from Pomona College (1975) and the University of Florida (1978), and his PhD from the Rangeland Ecosystem Science Department at Colorado State University in 1987. 
 
Jason Neff, US Future Earth Secretariat Global Hub Associate Director
Dr. Jason Neff is an Associate Professor in the Environmental Studies program at CU Boulder where he also directs the undergraduate program in Environmental Studies. His research area is in biogeochemistry with a focus on a diverse array of subjects ranging from studies of the carbon cycle to atmospheric mineral aerosols.  Through all these areas, Neff’s primary interest is in how human activities influence the movement of nutrients and material through the Earth System and the impacts of changing biogeochemical cycles on both natural ecosystems and human society.  He has served in a wide variety of roles at the University of Colorado and nationally and has authored over 80 scientific publications and a forthcoming introductory environmental science digital text titled ‘A Changing Planet: the Science of Sustainability’. Neff speaks frequently to the media and public on the topic of land use change and dust storms in the deserts of the western US and has served on advisory panels for a wide variety of organizations including the US DOE, NASA, NSF, NCEAS, and other international science agencies. Professor Neff received his BA in Biology from The University of Colorado at Boulder (1993) and a Ph.D. in Biology from Stanford University (1999).
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