Calendar

GCI Workshop

GCI Workshop: Global Aspects of Water Research and Management in Large River Basins

Date: 17 - 19 February
Venue: Center for Development Research (ZEF), Bonn, Germany (how to reach)

Workshop Program: Overview, Details,
Participants list

As part of its 2007-2010 project phase the Global Water System Project (GWSP) of the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) launched three major "global initiatives". One of them is the Global Catchment Initiative (GCI), which has the over-arching goal of expanding the viewpoint of river basin research and management to include the global perspective. (The term “global catchments” here refers to catchments with drainage areas about 100,000 km² or larger). Through the GCI, the GWSP will organize activities to encourage researchers to investigate questions having to do with the global water system and not normally addressed at the catchment-level. The GCI also aims to advance the state of scientific understanding of the global water system through a worldwide comparative study of catchments, identify regional feedbacks between the hydrologic system, the terrestrial environment, the climate system, and governance regimes, develop new ideas for adapting to undesirable global changes on the river basin scale, and to communicate these ideas to policymakers and other stakeholders.

The objectives of the workshop are:

1) To apply the 10 GCI questions to 10 to 15 catchments and to present results of this analysis. Although it may not be possible to come up with answers to all 10 questions in all catchments, we expect that enough common questions will be addressed so that a very interesting comparison of river basins will be achieved.

2) To examine the differences and similarities of the global dimensions for the various case study catchments

3) To identify robust, but preliminary conclusions about how global change plays out in different river basins. The aim is also to identify major unresolved research questions.

4) To plan a major follow-up conference on "The Dimensions of Global Change in River Basin Research and Management” which aims to reach a larger part of the scientific and policymaking community.

More generally, we expect that the workshop will work towards the goal of encouraging researchers working on the catchment-level to address questions associated with the global water system not normally addressed in catchment studies. Furthermore, we expect that it will contribute to form a new worldwide network of researchers working on global water system questions.