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Presentation ISE

The Institute for Environmental Sciences (ISE: Institut des Sciences de l’Environnement) is an inter-faculty entity of the University of Geneva that was formally created in March 2009. Five faculties are involved in the institute’s activities, namely the Faculty of Science, the Geneva School of Social Sciences, the Geneva School of Economics and Management, the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Medicine.

The institute’s main objectives are to undertake research and teaching in the numerous inter-connected domains of the environment. The current foci of ISE include climate, water, biodiversity, energy, urban studies, sustainable development, and environmental governance, and the interlinks between each of these domains and beyond. The key objective in terms of education and research activities is to bridge the gap between the natural and human environments in order to strive towards common solutions to complex problems that cannot be addressed though any single discipline alone. Reaching this goal requires an in-depth understanding of the functioning of the fundamental physical, biological and chemical processes underlying Earth systems, protection of natural resources, social and medical well-being, sustainable energy use, and efficiently interfacing Science and Policy.

ISE is structured into four major hubs, each of which reflects their links to the faculties that support the institute. Numerous research groups interact both within and across these hubs in order to breach the traditional disciplinary barriers, and all groups contribute to the Masters programs that are housed within ISE.

Despite being a relatively newcomer to the Geneva academic world, ISE has already achieved a number of successful objectives, in particular the coordination of three major integrated projects within the 7th Framework R&D program of the EU (the ACQWAenviroGRIDS and EOPWER projects), participation in other European networked projects, those funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, and targeted investigations funded by public and private bodies. In 2013, the “PlanetSolar DeepWater” expedition that aimed at exploring ocean-atmosphere interactions along the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic using the world’s largest solar-powered vessel - the Swiss “Tûranor Planet Solar” - received unprecedented media attention around the globe.

Since its inception, ISE has fostered a number of international relations, in particular through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP-GRID), and the World Health Organization, whose secretariats are located in Geneva. The international dimension of ISE has also been reinforced by its research and teaching agreements with UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles), UQAM (University of Quebec at Montreal), York University (Ontario, Canada) and, more recently, with the University of Sydney (Australia) and Zayyed University (Abu Dhabi).

In terms of its teaching commitments, the institute leads a Masters Program in Environmental Science, with over 100 students currently and, since 2014, another Masters Program on Territorial Development which attract students both from Switzerland and overseas. They clearly respond to the needs expressed by young and motivated students to explore the complex and global nature of environmental issues that are today high on the economic and political agenda of many countries around the world.

Finally, the staff of ISE contributes substantially to public, political and media requests for information on the overarching issues addressed by ISE, through public lectures, newspaper articles, radio and TV interviews as well as through regular updates of the environmental information service run by the Swiss TV network (“RTS Découvertes”) in association with the France-5 TV channel.