Kick-off meeting of the JPI Climate 1st Joint Call - Tackling global societal challenges through innovative climate research
The kick-off meeting of the JPI Climate 1st Joint Call - Tackling global societal challenges through innovative climate research took place on June 16th, 2015, at the premises of the JPI Climate Central Secretariat in the BELSPO building in Brussels (Belgium). The meeting was chaired and moderated by Alexis Sancho Reinoso and Elisabeth Worliczek (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria and Governing Board member of JPI Climate).
The goals of this event were to boost networking at different levels, to foster capacity building among the projects and to explore outreach and communication strategies.
The meeting attracted 35 participants from different backgrounds, including representatives from the consortia selected in the context of the joint call, representatives from research funding agencies, members of the JPI Climate Transdisciplinary Advisory Board and experts on transdisciplinary research. Out of the nine JPI Climate funded projects, almost all consortia were able to attend: the six activities funded under topic one Societal Transformation in the Face of Climate Change and one of the projects under topic 2 Russian Arctic & Boreal Systems. Only one wasn't able to attend as all representatives were on the field by that time.
First of all the Lead Principal Investigators or other representatives of the consortia presented their respective projects and expected outcomes, Some opportunities for collaboration between projects was already discovered at this early stage of the workshop. To set the stage for further discussions, invited speakers presented their vision on transdisciplinary research and the expectations for the joint call.
Speakers included:
- Sebastian Helgenberger, from the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (Germany) and JPI Climate
- Roland Scholz, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Switzerland)
- Christian Pohl, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Switzerland)
The presentations were alternated with breakout sessions, where the representatives from the different consortia got together to present the respective projects, to exchange experiences related to consortia set-up and management and to identify ways to make advances towards more transdisciplinary practices.
More information about the projects can be found here.
The report of the meeting is available here.