Call for papers - International Conference on Water, Megacities and Global Change 2020

International Conference on Water, Megacities and Global Change

About the Organization:

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) based in Paris. They declared purpose is to contribute to promoting international collaboration in education, sciences, and culture in order to increase universal respect for justice, the rule of law, and human rights along with fundamental freedom proclaimed in the United Nations Charter.

Call for papers:

The Water, Megacities and Global Change conference will illustrate how the research community and the operational world benefit through collaboration. In addition to experts and scientists, it will include civil society representatives and elected officials to highlight the importance of the sound policy-making.

Youth will be given a voice to share their perspective on all topics covered by the conference, and artists will be invited to illustrate the symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of water management issues in megacities and their impact on global change.

Overview of Thematic Areas:

The conference will address two main thematic areas: challenges, and solutions.

The first thematic axis will analyze the determinant issues to be addressed to maintain and strengthen the often precarious balance of these mega urban systems, especially in the context of the accelerating global change:

• Risk reduction.
• The continuity of services, addressing disruption, intermittent access and crisis situations.
• Understanding the necessary technical and social conditions to ensure resilient resources and systems.
• Taking into account land issues such as densification, gentrification, urban sprawl and transition areas between the heart of megacities and external territories.
• Maintaining "the ethics of nature".
• Governance arrangements in megacities.
• Holistic water management.
• The Sustainable Development Goals as a tool for measuring the adaptation of water services to global change.

The second axis will address the types of solutions (means, methods, tools) that can be implemented to support water management in megacities:

• Planning tools to anticipate urbanization or regulate informal settlements; Water-Energy-Waste Nexus.
• Innovative governance initiatives (technical, institutional or social).
• Technical and technological devices, which extend over a continuum from "classic" civil engineering works (large, relatively irreversible developments...) to new management technologies with the smart city label or nature-based solutions that can address challenges at the megacities scale.
• The "new water cultures".
• Strengthening sustainable solidarity, through mechanisms of cooperation, partnership, governance and development.
• Financing at the appropriate scale: for urban areas and water basins.

Timeline:

• Expressions of interests in the form of short abstracts must be submitted by 29 February 2020.
• Full papers must be submitted for evaluation and review by 31 July 2020.
• Finalized papers must be submitted by 30 September 2020.

Contact:

Alexandros Makarigakis

Programme Specialist

Division of Water Sciences, UNESCO

Tel.: +33 (0) 1 45 68 08 06

eaumega2020@unesco.org

For more information please check the Link