Stanford University’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve in Menlo Park, California, was the venue for an international meeting held February 6–8 and organized by the Task Group on Data and Scenario Support for Impact and Climate Analysis (TGICA) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) secretariat to address the data and information needs of the scientific community involved in assessing the implications of climate change for society.TGICA was established by the IPCC to coordinate data management efforts across IPCC working groups and between IPCC assessments, including oversight of the IPCC Data Distribution Centre (DDC). CIESIN director Robert Chen and senior staff associate Xiaoshi Xing represented the socioeconomic portion of the DDC, which is hosted by the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN. Chen presented a new DDC data and information access policy, which was approved by the TGICA. Xing contributed to discussions about improvements to a new information resource on the development of new scenarios of future socioeconomic and environmental development, which he helped to implement. Chen continues to serve as an ex officio member of the TGICA, which is now co-chaired by Timothy Carter from Finland and Bruce Hewitson from South Africa. Read More
