Program Structure

The CIMR Symposium will provide participants with a unique opportunity to collectively identify challenges and opportunities for responding to seasonal climate variability and decadal climate change. Thus the overall theme “Local to Regional Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies” will be developed throughout in plenary sessions, panel discussions, and poster sessions.

Plenary Sessions — Experts from around the world will be invited to address the following topics.

• State of knowledge on climate variability, climate change, coastal inundation at seasonal, decadal, and multi-decadal time scales

• Developing local scenarios for decadal and multi-decadal climate change

• Likely impacts and opportunities for adaptation to climate change for vulnerable sectors, including agriculture, water resources, coastal communities, wetlands and estuaries, forests, and wildlife.

Concurrent Sessions - Panel Discussions — Concurrent Panel discussions will be initiated by about 4 or 5 short presentations followed by open discussion. Panelists will be invited from volunteer abstracts, hence session topics will be established based on the volunteer presentations.

Themes for breakout sessions include:

• Managing risks to agriculture

• Water resource management

• Coastal and urban communities

• Biodiversity and conservation in natural ecosystems

• Public health

• Cross-sector impacts

• Scenarios for planning

• Land use and land cover changes

Within each of these themes, panel discussions will include:

• Barriers to integration

• Risk management and trade off analysis

• Methods for stakeholder engagement

• New tools for decision support

• Climate education and extension

• Climate impacts, adaptation, mitigation, and vulnerability

Poster Session — A poster session is planned to further advance discussion on the above topics.