This award provides support for the International Project Office (IPO) of the Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC) project, an international collaborative research project sponsored by the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). UGEC has functioned since 2005, coordinating and facilitating new knowledge generation and dissemination about global environmental change in urban areas, placing special emphasis on collaborative activities that bridge the social and natural sciences as well as national boundaries. Through its catalytic impact on development of new research projects and its networking activities, UGEG has become an international leader in research on urbanization and global environmental change. The IPO has built an international interdisciplinary research coordination network of scholars and practitioners whose work deals with various facets of the interface of cities and the environment, promoting collaboration among academics and practitioners as urban areas prepare to respond to global environmental change. During this third phase of UGEC activity, the IPO will promote the next generation of UGEC research, with an emphasis on synthesizing findings and connecting science to policy. The IPO will promote, coordinate, and disseminate science and policy findings in the UGEC field by actively providing a platform for the docking and synthesis of global case-studies. It also will continue to facilitate connections between research and practice by organizing international workshops and conferences utilizing cutting-edge communication tools, and it will assist in increasing the connections between U.S.-based networks of UGEC scholars and practitioners with their international counterparts.
The UGEC IPO will make significant contributions to UGEC science and policy by facilitating integrative and synthetic understanding springing from new interdisciplinary knowledge. It will encourage innovative conceptual and methodological approaches that link the social sciences with the natural sciences, and it will establish a new platform for the realization of continuous synthesis activities. The IPO will operate at the boundary of science and practice, communicating its integrative efforts to decision makers, practitioners, and other end-users at different scales. Through its support for international collaborative research and its encouragement for the involvement of early-career scientists in such efforts, the UGEC IPO helps address the social, economic, and environmental consequences of urbanization in diverse settings around the globe.
