International Conference on Rapid Sea Level Change- a Caspian Perspective

Welcome to our international conference on rapid sea-level change. While concern about sea-level rise is global, our host country the Islamic Republic of Iran and the neighbouring Caspian countries have a concern of their own. Here, Caspian sea level rose a hundred times as fast as in the world’s oceans. Whereas oceanic sealevel rose 13 centimeter during the whole twentieth century, the Caspian sea rose 13 centimeter each year in the period between 1977 and 1995. Caspian coasts had to cope with a sudden sea-level rise of three metres in twenty years. Therefore, when looking for a place for an international conference on sea-level change in the framework of the UNESCOIGCP 490 project The role of Holocene environmental catastrophes in human history and the Dark Nature programme of ICSU on Rapid natural change and human responses the Caspian is a logical choice. In the recent past the Caspian countries have already experienced what we fear could happen to us in the near future elsewhere in the world. They can tell us what happened along the coasts, how people reacted to these events, and what lessons they have learnt from that. We all can benefit from their experience. The conference lines up with the third annual meeting of the UNESCO-IGCP 481 programme Dating Caspian Sea-Level Change that addresses these problems more specifically. The aim of this meeting is to bring together scientists working on global sea-level change, rapid sea/lake level change, not only in the Caspian but also in other closed basins, to discuss the origin of sea and lake level change, its steering mechanisms, its synchronicity (or not) with global climate change and tectonic processes, its consequences for environment and coastal management, its impact on human society and human responses. We are very grateful that the Guilan University has offered to host this conference in Rasht, near the Caspian shore, and only a few kilometres away from the town of Ramsar, where the International Wetlands Convention was signed in 1971. We wish you a successful meeting.