Global Center of Excellence in Climate Change, Environment and Disasters (GCE-CCED)

The Global Center of Excellence in Climate Change, Environment and Disasters (GCE-CCED) began life with the new millennium as a vehicle to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration among other research and development institutions (e.g., centers, institutes, colleges, universities, and research organizations etc.), engaged in environmentally-sensitive development, research and training efforts within and outside Pakistan. GCE-CCED represents a concerted attempt to break away from the restrictions imposed by the traditional compartmentalization of research, aiming to transcend disciplinary boundaries in its search for solutions.

The Center fosters research on environmentally-sensitive development issues that is policy-relevant, interdisciplinary and involves non-academic partners. In its research, the Center recognizes the linkages between environment and development issues in the decisions of governments, industries, and communities. The concept of environmentally-sensitive development implies the need to connect environmental imperatives directly to economic and social priorities. GCE-CCED also seeks to develop research "tools", that provide users with the capacity to make up their own minds about the complex issues surrounding environmentally-sensitive development. It fosters all Interested and Affected Parties (IAPs) to collaborative research processes and workshops to put current understanding from the research community in the hands of user community. This provides it with a role that goes beyond merely translating the results of research into intelligible forms, but requires the development of truly collaborative processes for the production of useful knowledge on environmentally-sensitive development issues.

The Center's policy is to balance carefully its research and capacity building (training) activities and its institutional development activities/consulting assignments for/in collaboration with its partner organizations and clients.

The strategy of combining practice and capacity building enables the training program to profit immediately from policy initiatives and project innovations. Moreover, this unique feature of GCE-CCED means that staff / Associates are constantly confronted with the practical implications of its work. In addition, capacity building and training activities are easily strengthened and complemented by fieldwork with local counterparts in actual, operational situations through applied research, institutional development and consulting work. GCE-CCED also undertakes research and consulting contracts, and employ professional staff /Associates for support of these activities.