The mission of the Global Environmental and Climate Change Centre:
- To promote an outstanding research program at all levels (graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty) focusing on the integration among physical, biological and chemical processes that regulate the climate system, and their socio-economic impact.
- To facilitate scientific cooperation among a cross-disciplinary group of Québec researchers in climate and global change science and impact assessment, and to promote Québec research at the national and international levels.
- To assume a lead role in global change issues and to provide input to the academic and public debate on environmental and climate change in Québec, Canada and internationally.
Centre Background
The natural environment has provided resources for human beings since the dawn of the first human. Over the past several centuries, the nature of the interaction of humans with the environment has changed dramatically. The increase in population has led to an increase in consumption of resources, and this has in turn led to unprecedented global scale changes in the environment. For example, the worldwide concentration of carbon dioxide has increased from about 280 ppm in the pre-industrial age to 360 ppm currently. Nearly 50% of the land surface has been transformed by humans. These activities affect the environment and climate in complex ways that are not well understood. There is thus an urgent need to better understand the nature of the science of environmental and global change, so that we will be better equipped to deal with the consequences of our action on the environment and climate. This calls for a multi-disciplinary approach as global change necessarily involves complex interaction of different components of the climate system.
The Global Environmental and Climate Change Centre (GEC3) is a cross-disciplinary multi-university research centre bringing together more than 40 researchers from six Québec universities (McGill University, Université de Montréal, Université du Québec à Montréal, Université de Sherbrooke, Université Laval, Collège François-Xavier-Garneau, Institut National de la Recherche Scientific) to study processes, modelling and impact of environmental and climate change. The climate system consists of components (atmosphere, ocean, land surface, sea-ice, biosphere) interacting in a complex way to produce variability on different time scales (seasonal, inter-annual and longer). Climate research is thus inherently cross-disciplinary. Human activities have profoundly changed greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and patterns of vegetation distribution and land use; these affect climate and its variability. This variability includes the occurrence of extreme events such as hurricanes, floods and droughts, which have a high impact on society in terms of loss of human lives and economic cost.
The concern of the ordinary citizen for climate change is at an all-time high. This is seen through frequent articles and reports on this topic in the press (newspapers, magazines, television, radio). Society’s concern has also led to specific institutional commitments on the part of government and funding bodies, such as the establishment of the Ouranos consortium in Québec on regional climate and its impact, the $110 million Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences (CFCAS) that funds university research, and identification of environmental and climate research as strategic areas for universities. To perform the research on global change in the coming years, we will need highly qualified personnel who are trained in this area. The Centre has an important role to play in this respect, as described in the mission statement above.
Member Institutions
Université du Québec à Montréal