Crisis Forum
Climate Change and Violence workshop series, 2008 – 2010

Workshop 1: Climate Catastrophe, Where are we heading ?
Friday 14 November 2008, University of Southampton

=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=

The forthcoming Crisis Forum workshop series opens on 14 November 2008 at the University of Southampton : the first of seven, one day workshops to explore and interrogate the connections between accelerating anthropogenic climate change and the potentiality for violence in all its forms.

Anyone who has an interest in this area : academics, practitioners within NGOs and think-tanks, policy makers in government or business, journalists or independent researchers are invited to participate.

This workshop will act as a primer for more specific interrogations of theme in subsequent workshops, and will introduce the background, implications and potentialities for violence writ-large, as a consequence of climate change, and/or likely human assumptions and responses, military, political, economic, social, or technological to such change.

Each workshop is designed to enable plenty of time for interaction between speakers and other participants.

=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=

 http://www.crisis-forum.org.uk/events/workshop1_agenda.php

Outline of day
----------------------------------------
Why climate change and violence ? Dr Mark Levene (Crisis Forum)

How bad is bad ? What the science is telling us

David Wasdell (Director, Meridian Programme) 'Climate Dynamics and the Potential for Violence in an Interconnected World'

Prof. Kevin Anderson (Tyndall Centre, University of Manchester) 'Reframing Climate Change: from long-term targets to emission pathways'

Climate Change and Security
-----------------------------------------------------
Prof. Paul Rogers (Peace Studies, University of Bradford) Structural underpinnings of violence in an age of acute climate change

Patrick Holden, CBE (Director, Soil Association), 'Food security'.

Aubrey Meyer (Global Commons Institute), 'The Stern report and the economics of genocide.'

Future shock
--------------
Prof. Dave Webb, (Praxis Centre, Leeds Metropolitan University, and vice-chair CND), 'Geo-engineering and its implications'.

=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=

Places are limited, so please register your intention to attend as soon as possible by contacting

Marianne McKiggan.

There will be a small registration fee of £30.00
Concessionary places are also available on request to Marianne.

Please feel free to forward this invite as appropriate to friends and colleagues.

=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=

Dr Mark Levene
Crisis Forum project director
Telephone : 023 80 59 48 67
e-mail :  ml1@soton.ac.uk

Marianne McKiggan
Crisis Forum project coordinator
e-mail :  marianne@crisis-forum.org.uk
Telephone (unsure if this is correct) : 01794 501778 (uncertain if this is correct)

=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=

General Information

Crisis Forum is convening a series of seven workshops which will be held in diverse universities, and or other institutional venues throughout the country, running though academic years 2008 to 2010. These, subject to numbers, will be open to anybody with an interest, whether academics, independent researchers, from NGOs, think-tanks, or other institutional organisations, including government and corporations. Presentations are invited for each workshop.

The purpose is to develop a full and holistic analysis of relationships between accelerating anthropogenic climate change and its political, military, social, and more broadly human, including public health, consequences. A dialogue between very different perspectives will be central to its development. Out of it will emerge an independent report which will be accessible not only to policy makers but to the wider public. The report will be made available on the web via a dedicated website. Underlying this purpose might be read the simple notion of ‘forewarned is forearmed’. But more exactly, our aims are :

1. To chart the likely contours of violence at all local, national, regional, and international levels, in a global political economy which remains at this moment still wedded to ‘business as usual’.

2. To raise questions about what the human community writ-large and communities writ-small, need to be thinking about and doing in the immediate and medium-term, not only in order to respond effectively in terms of mitigation and adaptation to rapid climate change but concurrently, in the process, avoid violence.

This first session seeks to bring together two traditionally very separate disciplinary areas, one the study of earth sciences, the other, the study of violence, in order to set the scene for subsequent workshops.

A morning session will consider the relationships between anthropogenic climate change, consequent radiative forcing and earth feedback dynamics to ask a key, albeit very unscientific question: ‘how bad is bad’ ? Is it possible to prognosticate on the consequences of accelerating climate change for the human species ?

A second session will start by asking ‘what is violence’ and from that proceed to consider what factors in the historic and anthropological record, as well as contemporary world, we most associate with its causation and manifestation. Does mainstream thinking on contemporary violence with its heightened emphasis on resource wars, jihadist terrorism and notions of clashes of civilisations, assist consideration of likely trajectories in an age of rapid climate change, or instead impede it ? If the latter, what other considerations need to be taken into account ?

We will attempt to meld these two parts together in a final, third exploratory session: does climate change offer a new paradigm for the study of violence ? In particular, it will pose the question: is there some point, beyond which - perhaps when thresholds in physical and ecological systems have been shown to have been irrevocably broken - we enter entirely new and uncharted terrain ? And, if so, what value is there in staring into this abyss ?

=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=