Erda RTE

Erda RTE in cooperation with Pskov State University (Russia) and International NGO Ekapraekt (Belarus) organises a short scientific conference "Urban futures and urban ecosystems – Russian and European perspectives" and a stakeholder roundtable talk on urban biodiversity and ecosystem services in urban and peri-urban areas, and related research, management, planning and governance issues. The event will include a short (half a day) scientific conference with a plenary and 3-4 panels, and a roundtable discussion of stakeholders involved into municipal governance on vision and appreciation of ecosystems in urbanised environments. The conference and the stakeholder talk will be held on the premises of Pskov State University.

The conference and the roundtable talk are organ

ised as a part of Erasmus+ Jean-Monnet module “Governance of natural resources – EU experience and challenges for Russia”.

Erda RTE co-organises with Siberian Federal University (Krasnoyarsk, Russia) a summer school on monitoring and early warning systems for biodiversity governance in July 10-24, 2016; the school will start and close in the city of Krasnoyarsk, the theoretical and methodological training will be held in the University's summer camp, while for the field research the participants and the faculty will travel to Ergaki Nature Researve in beautiful Sayany mountains. The latest updates, including the full call for applications, detail description and the application form are available from http://www.sfu-kras.ru/en/education/courses/ecological-school

The school is co-organised under Jean-Monnet module Systems for monitoring and responses to early warnings – EU experience for Russia

Sense-making for anticipatory adaptation to heavy snowstorms in urban areas, a paper co-authored by Anton Shkaruba and Viktar Kireyeu has been published in Urban Climate.

The paper takes a case of Xavier snowstorm of March 15–16, 2013 in two Belarusian cities of Minsk and Mahilioŭ, and uses it to demonstrate how failures in communication in organisation hamper adaptation to an extreme weather event even in such a snow-proof society as Belarus. Highly hierarchical governance by the state causes a number of institutional misfits and interplays resulting in major implementation and decision making deficits; for the same reason governmental organisations have limited capacity to learn and prepare for future adaptations. Non-state actors were reluctant to take pro-active approach on the phase of post-disaster sense-making, although they demonstrated strong leadership and selforganisation during the storm. Except generic governance issues in Belarus, this also can be due to mal-resilient institutional legacies lasting from USSR times.

Erda RTE has become the fifth Dutch member of the European Land-Use Institute (ELI).

ELI is an independent multilateral cooperation platform that started 2011/12 funded through the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) and continues now based on a collaboration agreement and in-kind contributions of the partners. Beyond, ELI maintains the partnership and its services on the basis of mutual collaboration projects and partially based on conferences. ELI is the European Nodal Office of the Global Land Project (GLP) with a thematic focus on land management, land use planning and land use policies. ELI cooperates with the International Association of Landscape Ecology (IALE), International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO), Ecosystem Service Partnership (ESP) and German Alliance for Agricultural Research (DAFA).