ICSU becoming ISC ... Biocluster

There is wide recognition that humanity’s impact on the globe – in driving species to extinction, altering the chemistry of the world’s waters and air and shifting its climate – is staggering. But just how big is that impact? How does it compare, for example, to the asteroid that crashed into the Earth 65 million years ago, causing one of the major extinction events in the planet’s history.

Urbanization is increasingly central to the global development process, but until recently, basic spatial information on the world’s urban areas has been unavailable, inconsistent, or unreliable. [[tweetable]]The lack of consistent data on the world’s cities makes it hard to understand the overall impact of urbanization[[/tweetable]]. However, innovations in geospatial mapping are now helping to provide one major piece of the puzzle:[[tweetable]]maps of practically all built-up areas around the world are available thanks to new uses of satellite data[[/tweetable]]. Scientists at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) have succeeded in using a [[tweetable]]newly developed method to map the world’s built spaces at an unprecedented spatial resolution[[/tweetable]], resulting in the ‘Global Urban Footprint’ (GUF), a global map of human settlements at a spatial resolution of 12 meters per grid cell (aggregated to 75m for public use). The German radar satellites TerraSAR X and TanDEM X acquired over 180,000 images between 2010 and 2013, which were processed, together with additional data such as digital terrain models, to produce the Global Urban Footprint. In total, the researchers processed over 20 million datasets with a combined volume of more than 320 terabytes.

By scouring the sewers of European urban areas, scientists have managed to take a peek into the drug habits of 50 different cities across the continent.

The 2018 Cities and Climate Change Science Conference co-sponsored by theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), promises to be a pivotal event in developing the global understanding of cities and climate change.In order to prepare for this important event, the organisers are looking for members to be part of the Scientific Steering Committee (SSC), whose key mandate will be to develop the scientific strategy and vision to achieve the conference objectives, namely: