A South Pacific regional writeshop to support developing country publications on Disaster Risk Reduction and Adaptation to Climate Change will be held next month in Suva, Fiji.
A call for applications is now underway for young scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and others from the South Pacific who are working in the field of climate change and disaster risk reduction.
The writeshop will be hosted by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) and the University of the South Pacific (USP), with support of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research executed C3D+ Project funded by the European Union, the Austrian Development Agency and the Swiss Government.
Pacific participants at an Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) meeting at the UNFCCC COP 16 in Cancun
It will address topic relevant to climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction such as, 'policies, institutions and governance issues to adaptation and disaster risk reduction' and 'experiences with specific extreme climate events in the region.'
"We are really pleased to be able to offer this opportunity for our Pacific people," said Mr. Taito Nakalevu, Project manager of the Pacific Adaptation to Climate Change project.
"We'd like to see more work from Pacific islanders in academic journals and other such fora, and we plan that this training will help bring this about. Already there is a lot of information gathered at the national level as part of adaptation or climate change work, it is through this writeshop that we'd like to see this reach the next stage, which is writing and producing articles for peer review and publication in academic journals and such."
Participants will produce a peer-review quality publishable article and they will gain enhanced awareness of the process of writing papers for academic journals. These skills will allow their work to be incorporated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other high-level scientific bodies and consequently inform policy making on key issues of risk and climate.
The writeshop is organised by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) the Secretariat of the Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) and the University of the South Pacific (USP). It will be held from 10 – 14 October, 2011.
Applications are expected to be submitted by the 10th of September, 2011.