CEARC's Director, Jean-Paul Vanderlinden, has been invited to give a lecture at a plenary session of the Royal Belgian Academy of Overseas Sciences.  His talk, pertaining jointly to work conducted in the course of the ARTisticc project and in the course of the Saigon Dong Nai Sustainable Flood Risk Management project.  The title and abstract is given here:

Paradigm Shifts, Coastal Zones, and Adaptation to Fast-Paced Change: Lessons from Senegal, India (Kerala and Tamil Nadu), Vietnam, Canada (New Brunswick), France (Britany), Russia (Sakha Republic) and the USA (Alaska).

Keywords: Adaptation, Climate change, Science policy integration, Coastal zone, Transdisciplinarity, Environnemental humanities.

If one projects oneself further into the twenty-first century, taking stock of what is known today about the future, one quickly recognizes the need to develop new strategies to face the rapid changes that coastal areas will be going through.  Adaptation, at a pace rarely known to humankind, may very well be the most challenging endeavor for coastal communities. Using adaptation to climate change as a case study, we explore, in 9 different coastal settings, how such a paradigm shift is currently occurring.   Through the analysis of our fieldwork we show that knowledge creation currently transcends the traditional organization of science, and that this transcendence may be locally driven, implemented, and translated into policies.  We observe that in order to achieve such a shift, the Humanities in general, and Environmental Humanities in particular, are progressively moving to the forefront of adaptation science with, and for coastal communities. 

Program

Jea-Paul Vanderlinden's PPT