What are the effects of urban development and land-use change on biodiversity and ecosystem service delivery? How are different socio-economic groups affected by environmental changes in urban regions?

How do existing institutions, jurisdictions and legal systems in the urban areas impact on the delivery of, and access to, ecosystem services such as drinking water, clean air, recreation, etc.?

Urbanization represents an enormous challenge when it comes to resilience and equitable supply of resources

How did ancient people, such as the Hohokam(in Arizona) and the Nabateans (in the Negev, Jordan) – utilize/cultivate desert/arid land, and what can be learned from that on climatic change and the Earth systems?

In order to reverse desertification, and to make 33% of the land liveable.

It will be my pleasure to assist your scientists in this study.

Professor Ervin Yehuda Kedar

p.s. I mapped 2,000,000 dunams of ancient agriculture and wrote over 100 scientific articles in journals and a book (published 50 years ago).

How to disentangle the roles of land use/land cover change, climate variability and climate change on water flows and supply and demand for ecosystem services? Are rural poor and their land use blamed for what is in fact climate dominated? Can specific land cover really reduce vulnerability? How to pay/compensate for this?

Interactions between land use/land cover change, climate variability and climate change (trends or modified variability) on ecosystem service supply and demand. Current public debate moves between extremes of attribution: from blaming all on deforestation to blaming all on climate change. Biophysical attribution needs to be linked to financial and policy instruments, but the science to do this properly is poorly developed. Attention will be needed for public discourse as well as hard facts in a range of different landscape settings, using existing or new transects.