Regional Integration
Tuesday, 17 January 2012 10:55
There is a need to understand how society and the environment have evolved over multi-decadal timescales to create modern landscapes. This can be achieved through integrating instrument, document, paleoenvironmental and archaeology records within regions to produce ‘socio-environmental profiles’. Such profiles are especially important to the development of policies and strategies in regions where successful management of key environmental processes, ecological services and their interaction is critical, for example, within natural wildernesses, biodiversity hotspots, climate change hotspots or regions projected to be particularly vulnerable to combinations of stressors.
This Theme will initially integrate past evidence for environmental processes and ecological services for selected regions that are projected by the IPCC (Fig. 2.23) and others (e.g., Giorgi, 2006) to be climate change “hotspots”. It will compile and integrate records in order to:
1) Identify drivers of change,
2) Track socio-environmental trajectories,
3) Establish levels of modern resilience and vulnerability,
4) Provide the basis for the development and validation of dynamic models for scenario production.
The Regional Integration Theme will develop links to other PAGES Foci (in particular Focus 2), the Global Land Project (GLP) and IHOPE.
