Welcome to PERNs cyberseminar on “Refugee and internally displaced populations, environmental impacts and climate risks”!

[Susana Adamo]

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to this PERN online cyberseminar on “Refugee and internally displaced populations, environmental impacts and climate risks”, which will run for 10 May 2021 to 19 May 2021, and is Co-sponsor by GEO Human Planet.

The kickoff webinar, held on Monday, May 10th, will be posted shortly in YouTube.

This cyberseminar will focus on new perspectives and innovative methodological approaches from geography, remote sensing, economics, disaster studies, and development studies that shed light on the environmental and climatic challenges faced by refugees, as well as impacts of camps on the local environment, and will offer potential solutions for addressing these challenges. With scholars and practitioners from around the world and considering a range of case studies, we will examine the interplay between refugees, the local environment, and climate change against the broader social and political contexts that frame these relationships. Field-tested approaches and analyses will commingle with nation-wide Big Data studies to offer a diversity of perspectives across geographic scales and regions. As such, this cyberseminar will provide a platform for dynamic engagement between different communities to advance our collective understanding and shared perspectives on refugee population-environment relationships in a changing climate.

Summary papers will be released through the course of the week and the experts will be online to answer questions and engage in discussion. In order of release during the cyberseminar:

- Tuesday, 11 May: Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi & Ellen Percy Kraly, Demographic perspectives on environmental impacts and climate risks of refugees and IDPs.

- Wednesday, 12 May: Andrew Kruckiewicz, Climate hazards, humanitarian engagement.

- Thursday, 13 May: Stefan Lang, EO-based environmental impact assessment of camps.

- Friday, 14 May: Catherine Nakalembe, RS assessment of Ugandan refugee camps.

- Monday, 17 May: Hadi Jaafar, Geospatial Environmental Assessment of Refugees’ vulnerability and impact on the water-energy-food-health climate nexus: Examples from the Syria – Lebanon case.

- Tuesday, 18 May: Geoffrey Kateregga, Open data collection in refugee settlements, humanitarian engagement.

- Wednesday, 19 May: Victor Nyamori, Legal protection of climate refugees.

Please send cyberseminar contributions to the email discussion list at pernse...@ciesin.columbia.edu

And to note, a few general guidelines: we recommend reading the background materials although this is not necessary for contributing in the dialogue. As a general rule we like to encourage informed contributions – i.e., based on first-hand research, personal observation, or familiarity with the literature. Where assertions are made, we suggest inclusion of citations and references as feasible.

Also, as noted on the PERN website: 

- Respectful disagreement is fine; impoliteness is not accepted.

- Opinions are welcome; advocacy is not - this is an intellectual debate, please refrain from using this forum for any advocacy purposes.

- Respect other's email space: do not repeat something you have already said and limit yourself to a reasonable number of postings.

We look forward to a stimulating discussion!

-- Jamon Van Den Hoek and David Wrathall, Oregon State University

-- Susana Adamo & Alex de Sherbinin, PERN Co-Coordinators, CIESIN, Columbia University