Examining Tropical Changes: Resilience in the Context of Disturbance and Transgression

Jan 31, 2019 - Feb 2, 2019 | Yale Chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters
New Haven, CT
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The Yale Chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters is proud to announce the 25th Annual Conference which will take place January 31-February 2, 2019 at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (New Haven, CT, USA).

The recent IPCC report demonstrates that environmental disruption is increasingly becoming our reality. Floods, droughts, landslides, and fires, along with deforestation, degradation, and fragmentation, challenge the survival of tropical forests and their people. Last year, tropical forests suffered the second-worst tree cover loss on record (WRI 2018). Tropical forest loss is contributing to climate change; and, at the same time, increasing climate changes is fuel further forest loss. The 2018 IPCC report raises crucial questions about how people and ecosystems respond to change: How are tropical forest ecosystems changing? What kinds of perturbations are most important? What can we learn from disturbance? What do transgressions look like in a rapidly changing world? How do practices of indigenous people and local communities approach adaptation? What makes some tropical systems—forests and their people—more resilient than others in the face of massive alterations? How does the political-economic order respond to these perturbations? Which communities, human and ecological, are most affected? How can research and practice unsettle traditional understandings of disturbance, resilience and transgression? This conference will be a time to reimagine processes of change.

Over the last 25 years, many mechanisms and tools have emerged to identify threats and increase resilience in tropical forests, yet the competing pressures on forests have not been reconciled. As climate change disturbances and human transgressions continue to worsen, actions and solutions must be delivered at a much faster pace. Since 1994, the Yale Chapter ISTF annual conferences have addressed global priorities including illegal logging, conservation finance, conflict and cooperation, landscape-scale restoration, ecotourism, certification schemes, food, and biodiversity. The 25th Annual Yale ISTF Conference will demand reflection on past lessons while envisioning the next 25 years of tropical forestry in a rapidly changing world.

Understanding where we have failed, where we have succeeded, and how we should move forward is essential. For the 2019 ISTF Conference, we invite academics, practitioners, policy-makers, activists and forest-dwelling peoples to share the challenges and opportunities in tropical forest landscapes and the perseverance of these complex networks in the face of global disturbances and transgressions.

For more information, please visit https://istf.yale.edu/2019-conference.

To register, please visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/istf-25th-annual-conference-2019-tickets-51418119981?ref=estw.

Where: New Haven, CT, USA 

When: 31 January - 2 February 2019

Organizers: Yale Chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters