Archive

In collaboration with the Swiss Science Film Academy, the mLAB presents the 5th Global Science Film Festival.

World politics and science meet on the big screen. The festival will show international feature films, documentaries and short films that link social developments with current scientific debates. Following the film screenings, the topics will be explored in depth in moderated discussions between the audience, filmmakers and researchers.

Click here for the whole programme
 

From September 13 to 15, 2023, we hosted the IGU CDES conference entitled «Rethinking the Economic Geography of Smaller Urban Places: Transformation and Well-Being in Small and Medium-Sized Towns». 45 participants from 14 different countries in the Global North and South came to Bern to discuss their latest research. The conference took place in Bern and in Biel/Bienne, where we held sessions in the Volkshaus and undertook a field trip to places like Terrain Gurzelen and the Swiss Innovation Park.

The Unit Economic Geography thanks our co-organizers from the Anton Melik Geographical Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia and Eva Kiss, IGU CDES president & economic geographer at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

(Conference webpage)

Jérôme Kopp (Climate Impact Research Group) has received the Heino Tooming Award 2023 by the ‹European Severe Storms Laboratory› (ESSL) for his work ‹Unique observational data from an automatic hail sensor network in Switzerland›. Congratulations!
 

GIUB celebrates International Women`s Day

Since about 10 years, the GIUB celebrates International Women`s Day with a soup lunch and inputs related to topics such as equal opportunities, gender and diversity. This year, the overarching theme was “GIUB strikes”. Dr. Simona Isler from the Gosteli Foundation provided very interesting insights on the history of the women strike, which took place in 1991 for the first time and in 2019 for the second time.
 

How much water does vegetation have access to? This information is key for understanding and simulating drought impacts, but largely unknown. A new paper by Benjamin Stocker and colleagues [link] estimates this quantity from remote sensing data with global coverage. See also here.
 

How much wetland cover has been lost globally through conversion to human uses? What are the loss drivers & hotspots? Answers in a new paper: Link
by Fluet-Chouinard, E., Stocker, B.D., Zhang, Z. et al.