Wrap-Up & Closing

Conference Synthesizing will be done by:

Prof. Rattan Lal is a Distinguished University Professor of Soil Science and Director of the Carbon Mgt. & Sequestration Center at the Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. He held positions at the Rockefeller Foundation, New Delhi, India, the University of Sydney, Australia, the IITA, Ibadan, Nigeria and Adjucnct Professor at the University of Iceland, Reykjavik. He is also a scientific advisor to IASS, Potsdam, Germany, member of the Federal Advisory Committee on Climate Assessment, and of the Scientific Advisory Board of DOD. He served in various international organizations such as the International Committee on Tropical Deforestation and Land Management, Nigeria (Chair), the World Association of Soil and Water Conservation (President), International Soil Tillage Research Organization (President), and the Soil Science Society of America (President). He was lead author of the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and Lead Author in IPCC reports.

Closing remarks by:

Verena Klinger-Dering joined the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety in 1992.  She worked in different areas ranging from public relations, international nature conservation policy to EU environmental policies. From 2008 to 2012  she was seconded to the Permanent Representation of Germany to the EU and has dealt with files amongst others in the area of nature conservation and biodiversity, EU environmental strategies and international environment agreements. Since September 2012 she works as policy officer in the unit for general , international and European aspects of water management. Her priorities of work are the promotion of international water cooperation and the mainstreaming of water issues into global initiatives and programs, i.e. the promotion of the water-energy and food security nexus in the follow-up process to the Bonn2011 Nexus Conference.

Bernhard Müller is the Director of the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER) in Dresden (Germany), and holds the Chair of Spatial Development at the Technische Universität Dresden. He is also currently the Director of the Dresden Leibniz Graduate School. Bernhard Müller’s research interests and expertise are in sustainable urban and regional development, and spatial planning as well as in issues of resilience and regional adaptation strategies.

Karl-Heinz Feger, Co-chair of the Steering Committee, serves as Dean of the Faculty of Environmental Sciences of the TU Dresden. He is director of the Institute of Soil Science and Site Ecology. He studied hydrology in Freiburg/Br. (Germany) and Zurich (ETH, Switzerland). After his PhD and habilitation in forest soils and hydrology/biogeochemistry in Freiburg he worked at Hohenheim University (Faculty of Agricultural Sciences) before in 2000 he became full professor at TUD. Research topics are soil-water-plant relations at various spatial scales. Karl-Heinz Feger is Editor-in-Chief of “Journal of Plant Nutrition and Soil Science” (German Soil Science Society DBG, Wiley-Blackwell) since 2003.