IIASA Conference Panel Discussion, Session 2

MEDIA

Panel Discussion, Session 2: Drivers of Global Change - People, Institutions and Technology

While demographic, economic, and technological developments are generally recognized as basic drivers of transformative change, the interactions of their dynamics present a major challenge and an area from which significant new insights are possible. How, for example, does education affect demographic processes or economic development? What differences do distributional and spatial income variations make to the behavior of the coupled social-environmental systems? What is the appropriate scale to study each of those phenomena? What will it mean to add another three billion, predominantly urban, healthier, and longer-lived people to the global middle class? What technologies, norms and institutions are effective in propagating sustainable production and consumption? What are the new challenges in modeling drivers and scenarios to depict alternative development pathways?

Moderator: Dirk Messner, Director, German Development Institute (DIE)

Wolfgang Lutz - Leader, World Population (POP) Program, IIASA, Founding Director of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, and Director of the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID)

Charlie Wilson - Research Scholar, Transitions to New Technologies (TNT) Program, IIASA and Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Anglia

Thomas Schelling - Nobel Prize Recipient (Economics) and Distinguished Professor, University of Maryland

Yolanda Kakabadse - President, WWF International

Adil Najam - Vice Chancellor, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and IIASA Council Member

Justin Yifu Lin - Professor and Honorary Dean, National School of Development, Peking University and Former Senior Vice President, Development Economics, and Chief Economist, World Bank