Keynote speakers

Barbaros Gönençgil –  Professor in the Istanbul University; Head of Geography Department; Head of Physical Geography Division in Geography Department and Open And Distance Education Faculty Geography Programme of Istanbul University.  Prof. Gonencgil is also the founder and the head of the Climate Change Division in İstanbul University Social Sciences Institute. He is the Secretary General of Turkish Geographical Society. His study areas concentrate on climate and environment.

Benjamin Burkhard – Professor in the Institute of Physical Geography and Landscape Ecology, Leibniz Universitat Hannover. Since 2001 he has worked on various ecosystem services projects, involved in research areas ranging across irrigated rice agriculture in Southeast Asia, landscape management in Finland, Bulgaria and integrative coastal zone management in the North Sea. In these projects, he has been carrying out integrative human-environmental systems analyses, spatial ecosystem service modeling, and indicator applications as well as resilience and adaptability assessments. Prof. Burkhard is member of the executive committee of the Ecosystem services partnership.

Chad Staddon – Professor of Resource Economics and Policy, Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of the West of England, Bristol. He is an internationally-recognised expert in the socio-economic dimensions of water and especially water services, founder-director of the International Water Security Network. His current research interests lie in the area of better understanding the nature and drivers of urban water demand and the potential for social and economic instruments to drive conservation efforts.

Dan Balteanu – Professor in the University of Bucharest and the Director of the Institute of Geography, Member of the Romanian Academy. His research field being geomorphology, environmental change and natural & technological hazards. Prof. Balteanu coordinated several national and international projects on the field of environmental sciences.

John Pickles – Professor of International Studies, Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Professor Pickles is an economic geographer trained in political economy and development studies, cultural and social theory, and continental philosophy.  His research currently focuses on global production networks, European economic and social spaces particularly post-socialist transformations in Central Europe and Euro-Med Neighborhood Policies in Southern Europe.

Milan Konečný – Professor in the Institute of Geography, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic and Director of the Laboratory on Geoinformatics and Cartography. His research currently focuses on science education, geostatistics and geodesy and surveying, digital cartography, remote sensing, etc.

Robert Begg – Professor in the Department of Geography and Regional Planning, Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His areas of interest are regional economic analysis and planning, product design and development, etc.