Climate Changer

Dear visitors, we got a message from Rob D. van den Berg, Chair of the Steering Committee at the International Workshop on Evaluating Climate Change and Development in Alexandria, Egypt, that just started today, May 10th and will contunue 3 more days.

Dear Participants,

We hope you will have a safe trip to Alexandria and hope to welcome you there to the International Conference on Evaluating Climate Change and Development. With more than 250 participants we really cannot call it a Workshop anymore!

The Steering Committee and the chairs of the parallel sessions have worked very hard to prepare the program and to ensure an interesting, challenging and promising meeting. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina has made its infrastructure available and will ensure a smooth running event. An Egyptian committee has prepared the opening Egypt session on Saturday, May 10 and the public event on Tuesday, May 12, when students will gather to learn more about climate change and its potential impact on Egypt and the world. The secretariat in Washington has worked tirelessly to coordinate efforts, travel and logistical arrangements and keep the website up to date.

Meanwhile, the subject of climate change and development is gaining prominence month by month. More alarming reports are appearing all the time. Sir Nicholas Stern has called climate change the single greatest market failure in recent decades. Investments needed to replace greenhouse gas emissions are calculated to be more than 23 trillion US dollars. The northern polar ice cap may disappear in summer within a decade. Warnings increase that we may soon reach a point where irreparable harm is done to our environment.

As ex post evaluators, we are in a difficult position to deal with such urgent matters. Our tendency is to say “let us wait another five years” to study whether interventions, modalities, policies and programs work and deliver outcomes and impacts. At such a critical period in history, should we move in the direction of “streams of evaluative evidence” where we integrate as much as possible with reliable and credible monitoring evidence? How can we make findings of the past and present relevant to the decisions on the future? What is the best way to evaluate climate change and development?

Recently we have seen the emergence of dire consequences of our energy hunger for poverty and development around the world. Growing demands for biofuels, higher prices for fertilizer, changing rainfall patterns and increasing land degradation have lead to less agricultural production for human consumption and higher food prices. These are jeopardizing the gains made to reduce extreme poverty in the world. The first Millennium Development Goal, to reduce extreme global poverty by half in 2015, which the world community seemed to be on track for, now may recede into a distant future. This should not be acceptable to the world community.

Some of the answers to the challenge, at least on the evaluation side, will come from you, the participants of this Conference. We look forward to hearing your presentations and interactions and we hope to have created an atmosphere in which exchange of ideas and experiences are encouraged and fruitful.

With your energy and input, this Conference can be a first step in an on-going dialogue on evaluation of climate change and development. We hope to create a “community of practice” – a network of evaluators, working on these issues, continuing to exchange experiences and good practices, and working on solutions to challenges. Furthermore, we encourage existing regional evaluation associations to incorporate chapters on environmentally sustainable development evaluation that will become part of the global network, thus also enabling support for capacity building in Southern countries. During the Conference we will also discuss how to continue making available the existing documentation to the emerging network in the form of a “repository of knowledge”, which would start with the evaluations, documents and reports gathered for this Conference. Lastly, we will also present the results and outputs of the Conference in various forms to ensure knowledge sharing throughout the community.

The Conference has been made possible through the generous contributions of many donors and partner organizations. We acknowledge their continued support and hope that the Conference will bring what they expected. We hope you will have a safe trip to Alexandria and welcome you to the Bibliotheca and the Conference!

Rob D. van den Berg

Chair of the Steering Committee

The workshop announcement contains additional information, as does the rest of the workshop web site.
Submissions of paper and presentation proposals were accepted through November 15th, 2007.
Registration is now closed. If you have any questions, please contact IntWorkshop@thegef.org.

The registration(sign-in) OPENS at Bibliotheca Alexandrina AT 11:30 has started today!

Related to 'International Workshop on Evaluating Climate Change and Development' topics :