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• Conference Program
• Economic Working Group: Final Summary
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• Environment Working Group: Final Summary
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Focusing on Florida, the Climate Change Conference will provide the latest scientific findings and identify impacts and actions that should be taken to respond to climate change. Global, national, and state experts will share their perspectives with conference participants in both general and concurrent sessions.

Climate Change and Florida

The Floridian environment is simultaneously a joy and a problem. Beaches, coral reefs, swamps, lakes, rivers, springs, pine woods, caves, estuaries and islands have attracted a population of more than 18 million and 90 million visitors a year. The problem is accommodating this human presence while maintaining the ecosystem services that we all depend upon.

This dynamic between people and environment is now heightened by the reality of climate change, both happening now and forecast for the future. The 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only confirms what many scientists and observers have postulated; climate change is here and real and that the main cause is the impact of human activity.

Documented results of climate change include global warming, increasing variability in rainfall and rainfall intensity, sea level rise and potentially greater hurricane intensity. All of these impacts are especially important to Florida both now and, increasingly, in the future. The Century Commission, formed by the Florida Legislature in 2005 to envision Florida's future, http://www.centurycommission.org/overview.asp has identified climate change as one of the most critical issues in assessing our State's future.

The Center for Environmental Studies (CES) at Florida Atlantic University, and the Patel Center at the University of South Florida, as conference organizers, invite you to meet, learn from and share information with officials at state, regional, and local levels; planners; environmental managers; university scientists; non-government organizations (NGO's); private citizens and authorities with experience in other states and at the global level. The conference serves to address three things:

1. Review our current knowledge of the impacts of climate change on Florida.
2. Discuss priorities in the need for action now to reduce and mitigate impacts.
3. Provide recommendations to the Century Commission and decision makers in the State on how best to integrate the dynamic of climate change in the environment, economy and social fabric of the State.

Who should attend? Professionals and those interested in: