Program & Activities

Capacity Building

Regional Research
-MAIRS

Vulnerability and Adaptation

Strategic Partnership Projects

Regional Research

Regional-scale global environmental change research activities conducted under the auspices of START fall into the following major thematic categories:

• Land Use Change and its Impacts
  
• Climate Variability and Change
  
• Changes in atmospheric Composition and its Impacts
  
• Global Change and Coastal Zones
  
• Vulnerability and Adaptation to Global Change

Inherent in START activities is the development of regional collaborative networks of scientists and institutions from developing countries engaged in international global change research programmes. START projects foster a regional, interdisciplinary approach emphasizing research-driven capacity building.

Regional START committees - operating on the basis of a bottom-up priority-setting approach - have developed initial agendas that they consider both globally significant and regionally relevant. These agendas typically tend to incorporate global change impacts (e.g. water and food security) and the links to sustainable development in addition to the fundamental science issues emphasized by international science programmes such as IGBP, IHDP, and WCRP.

This process has led to a substantial number of research programmes based on regional interests, capabilities, and leadership, and not insignificantly, a growth in confidence on the part of regional scientists.

Integrated regional studies provide a potentially powerful means for synchronizing what would otherwise be small-scale sectoral studies, attaining integration and syntheses, and providing the basis for a common agenda uniting regional and core project scientists.