The week-long 2009 UNU & MRF Summer Academy on Social Vulnerability focused on understanding the nature of tipping points of climate change as they are related to potential humanitarian crises and forced migration.

UNW-DPC, in cooperation with FAO and 2iE, organized a July regional workshop in Burkina Faso on “Capacity Development for Farm Management Strategies to Improve Crop-Water Productivity using AquaCrop”.

The topic of the 3rd Charles Cooper Annual Memorial Lecture, on 24 June at UNU-MERIT, was “Science and Technology in South Africa: Past Performance and Future Prospects”.

The Regional Impact of Technological Change in 2020 is a UNU-MERIT project that seeks to improve our understanding of the relation between the shift towards a knowledge-based economy and regional disparities in Europe.

The UNU-WIDER Discussion Paper “The Global Economic Crisis: Towards Syndrome-Free Recovery for Africa” considers the impact of the global economic crisis on Africa and the recovery efforts that will be required to respond.

The UNU-WIDER Research Paper “When to Start a New Firm?: Modelling the Timing of Novice and Serial Entrepreneurs” provides a theoretical model to determine the optimal time for starting a new firm.

This UNU-CRIS Working Paper reviews the various ways of looking at regional economic disparities and the necessary data requirements and sources for computing different types of disparity indicators.