Activities

Leipzig Geographic Colloquiums
4.12.18, 17.15-19.00 p.m., Kubus, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ:

Vorstellung von Studienergebnissen zur Wohnsituation und zu den Versorgungsdefiziten in deutschen Großstädten und Evaluierung wohnungspolitischer Instrumente (Förderung, Mietpreisbremse, Wohngeld) vor diesem Hintergrund.

The lecture series Leipzig Geographical Colloquium is jointly organized by the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ and the Institute of Geography of the University of Leipzig.

The Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN)  recently published its Second Assessment Report (ARC3.2): " Climate Change and Cities - Second Assessment Report of the Urban Climate Change Research Network". This is the result of an approx. five year process, gathering together more than 350 authors from over 100 cities worldwide to inform mayors, city officials and policymakers, urban planners, and a broad spectrum of researchers and advanced students in the environmental sciences on the development and implementation of effective urban climate change policies, leveraging ongoing and planned investments for populations in cities of developing, emerging, and developed countries. The ARC3.2 Summary for City Leaders was already presented in December 2015 at a UCCRN side session at the 21st UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris.

UFZ actively contributed to this Report as Coordinating Lead Authors, Lead Authors and with specific Case Studies on Santiago de Chile, Dar es Salaam and Jena. The experience to be part of this huge initiative and long-lasting process was tremendous. The network that has been built provides an excellent basis for future collaboration.

On September 18, 2018, Dr. Kerstin Krellenberg and Dr. Nathalie Jean-Baptiste , both currently guest scientists at the Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology at UFZ, presented the main findings of the Report and talked about their personal experiences as Coordinating Lead Author and Lead Author of this Report.

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FUSE-Workshop on Sustainable Living Labs
On September 10th and 11th, the UFZ FUSE team was happy to receive the project partners from ÖFSE, Vienna, to jointly develop the participation process inherent to the project. At UFZ, FUSE is located in the three IPs Urban Transformations, Water Scarcity and From Models to Predictions. The workshop was hosted jointly by the Departments Economics and Urban and Environmental Sociology.
For both case study cities, Amman (Jordan) and Pune (India), Sustainable Living Labs (SLL) will play a central role in the development of the coupled hydro-geological and agent-based food-water-energy model. The first stakeholder workshops will be conducted in February and March next year.
The workshop also provided further clarification on terms and definitions used within the project and provided a first common understanding on the local contexts.

PhD candidate M. Ueberham presented his poster titled Mobile measurements of environmental burdens and perception of expositions, photo: S. Kabisch In July 2018, we engaged in an inspiring, international and highly interdisciplinary IAPS conference in Rome for one week. The acronym IAPS stands for International Association of People-Environment Studies: it’s all about environmental research from global to local aspects. This association especially relates to the needs and challenges of humans in their respective environments. The UFZ was well-represented with convening two symposia, giving several talks, and exhibiting a poster, all related to our key issue urban transformations. The symposia on Green Infrastructure (GI) dealt with the respective foci GI to human well-being, and GI for a diversifying urban society. Having been well-attended, we could experience exciting scientific discussions and foster our networking. Other formats, such as the Young Researchers Workshop and Poster Session gave splendid opportunities for our young researchers to exchange with experienced international senior scientists and shed light to their research questions from different research angles.

The Helmholtz International Research Group CLAVE, a cooperation between the UFZ and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, has published a book on "Climate change, urban vulnerability and adaptation at the municipal level. Santiago de Chile and other cities in Latin America". It emphasizes the challenges of climate change and related impacts in different municipalities of the Metropolitan Region of Santiago de Chile. It reveals the interlinkages of socio-environmental fragmentation and urban vulnerability and points out the institutional adaptive capacity at the municipal level. It highlights adaptation needs according to the assessed vulnerability, which were developed in strong colaboration with the municipalities. Perspectives of other Latin American Metropolitan Regions complement with an international dimension.

Recently, the European Commission published the report on Science for Disaster Risk Management 2017. The report provides reviews of the scientific evidence base and its practical use in various areas of disaster risk management, in a format that is intended to be accessible to the well-informed practitioner. IP Member C. Kuhlicke was involved in the topic “risk perception”. The full report can be downloaded here.

Together with an interdisciplinary team of international social and environmental scientists, colleagues from the department of urban and environmental sociology as well as the IP Urban Transformations published a positioning paper on the topic of urban greening and social justice (Source: Haase, D., Kabisch, S., Haase, A. et al. 2017. Greening cities – To be socially inclusive? About the alleged paradox of society and ecology in cities. Habitat International Volume 64, June 2017, Pages 41–48 DOI: 10.1016/j.habitatint.2017.04.005). The paper discusses current challenges of a sustainable and green urban development set against the background of growing socio-spatial inequalities in cities and unsolved justice issues. The authors suggest six concrete prerequisites for a green and socially inclusive development, e.g. the acknowledgement of existing trade-offs between social and ecological processes, the inclusion of different opinions, wants and needs into planning, a focus on multi-actor governance as well as a political contextualization of the debate. The publication draws on results of an international workshop at UFZ on 1 June 2015 with 25 participants.

On January 12, 2017 a Matchmaking event for the joint Belmont Forum/JPI Urban Europe SUGI/Food-Water-Energy Nexus Call was organized by IP-members. At the same occasion, the regular meetings of the Scientific Advisory Board of JPI Urban Europe and UERA took place.
The Sustainable Urbanisation Global Initiative (SUGI)/Food-Water-Energy Nexus Call is jointly established by the Belmont Forum and the Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) Urban Europe. The cooperation aims at bringing together the fragmented research and expertise across the globe to find innovative new solutions to the Food-Water-Energy (FWE) Nexus challenge for sustainable urbanisation. Belmont Forum and JPI Urban Europe have partnered to ensure participants across physical, natural, social sciences, arts and humanities as well as decision makers and other stakeholders around the world. The overall goal is to rapidly evolve the knowledge base and advance indicators and assessment tools that are needed for a comprehensive understanding of the FWE nexus. The Matchmaking event at UFZ brought together a wide range of approx. 50 international participants, interested in active exchange to build up international consortia for the submission of project proposals. With the involvement of representatives of the managing board of JPI Urban Europe and Projektträger Jülich, participants were provided with additional information on content and organizational issues concerning to the call.
Contact person at UFZ:
Dr. Kerstin Krellenberg, Department Urban and Environmental Sociology

Organization of the Workshop “Environmental Justice and Quality of Life in Urban Transformations” within the IP Urban Transformations with a presentation by Christiane Bunge (Umweltbundesamt - German Environment Agency) on “Environmental justice contributing to the quality of life – areas of action for research, politics and practice” and the following short inputs from current IP projects: “Socio-spatial distribution of air pollution in Berlin. An Indicator for environmental quality, quality of life and environmental justice” by Dr. Annegret Kindler, “Individual-related expositions and vulnerabilities to environmental pollution in the urban space – potentials of mobile measurements” by Max Ueberham and “Environmental law and justice in the city” by Dr. Moritz Reese. In the following discussion, the concepts of environmental justice and equity were distinguished and put into context with the exposition of urban individuals to environmental risks.

Foto: IP UrbTrans/UFZ Das IP Urbane Transformationen organisierte die Arbeitsgruppe „Urban Real World Laboratories (RWL)” im Rahmen des UFZ-Workshops „Unpacking the political in contemporary discourses on sustainability transformations: Scoping a research area for applied social science”. Nach einer Präsentation von Matthias Wanner (Wuppertal Institut, TransZent) zu aktuellen RWL-Forschungsprojekten und dem WBGU-Gutachten „Der Umzug der Menschheit“ wurden Potenziale und Limitierungen der RWL als Forschungsansatz, sowie die Rolle der Wissenschaft in derartigen Projekten diskutiert.

The Side Event “Urban sustainability transformations in European Cities”. Organized by the IP UrbTrans in cooperation with the City of Brno, City of Leipzig and the Joint Programing Initiative JPI Urban Europe. Prague, Regional UN Habitat III Conference, 16-18 march, 2016. A short summary of the side event can be found here

The conference report of the 2nd German Future Earth Summit (January 2016 in Berlin) has recently been published including a description of the Side Event on “Integrative urban studies: urban sustainability transformations theme picnic” which was organized by our IP. The report is available online .

Indian International Conference on Air Quality Management (IICAQM 2016) with pre-conference “Winter School on Urban Air Pollution and Health Risks” in Chennai, India
Supported by the Indo-German Centre for Sustainability (IGCS), during 15th-16th February 2016, the IITM and UFZ jointly organized the Indian International Conference on Air Quality Management (IICAQM 2016) in Chennai. The conference topics included Air Quality Monitoring and Measuring Techniques, Air Quality Modelling, Emission Inventory, Source Apportionment, Source Receptor Modelling, Exposure Monitoring and Health Risk Assessment, Industrial Air Pollution and Control Technologies, Indoor Air Quality, Local, Regional and Global Air Pollution Case Studies. The UFZ participants, Prof. Dr. Uwe Schlink (Dept. Urban and Environmental Sociology) and Dr. Andrea Müller (Dept. Molecular Systems Biology), provided invited talks as well as lectures to the pre-conference winter school during February 11th – 13th. Cooperative research is made in the frame of the BMBF funded bilateral project “Air quality management system to study the vulnerability and health risks due to air pollution and climate change in urban areas”.

Anouncement for three international conferences on environmental urban studies:

• 8th European Conference on Sustainable Cities & Towns. Transformative Action: the potential for Europe. Organized by ICLEI Europe. Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain, 27-29 April 2016. More information
• 24. IAPS-conference in Lund/Sweden, 27 June -1 July 2016 and Young Researchers Workshop 26 – 27 June 2016. Abstract submission until 15 December 2015. More information
• Urban Cultures of Sustainability: International Graduate and Doctoral Student
  Workshop at Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) at the Albert-Ludwig-University Freiburg, 11–14 July 2016. More information
                

• Call for Contributions: We are currently working on an edited volume, which reflects the work of our IP. Our idea is to make this book a truly interdisciplinary result of our IP work. IP members are cordially invited to participate in this project, please let us know until August 31, 2015 if you want to write particiapte with an article on your work realized in the IP Urban Transformations. For further information please contact florian.koch@ufz.de .

GCITY_4D – „Heat Transformation" in urban areas On August 27 and 28, 2015 social and Natural sciences researchers from three different Helmholtz Centres discused at the UFZ in Leipzig, how shallow geothermal energy can contribute to the energy supply of cities. Further information: Olaf Kolditz .

• International Workshop "Environmental risks in Medellín, Colombia", in cooperation with Carmen Zapata (Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Medellin) on thursday, June 18 at UFZ. Program und an further Information  Uwe Schlink or Andrea Müller