MISSION

Building on trust and mutual respect established over a twenty-five year history of working in Asia, PISA prepares leaders for the challenges and opportunities of the 21st Century and mobilizes networks of scholars, policy makers, and advocates on both sides of the Pacific to address urgent national and transnational concerns.

Latest News

PISA has been very busy lately! Check our our News and Events Section to see what we have been up to!

Director's Note - Winter 2012

Whereas the weather in Washington, DC has been mostly mild this winter, we are reminded daily that our planet is changing in ways that challenge us to find new adaptive strategies. We can see that extreme weather in much of the world is becoming the norm. The year 2011 witnessed record flooding in Bangkok and Pakistan, drought and extreme heat in Texas and the Horn of Africa, and alarming glacial melting in the Himalayas and Arctic.

PISA greets 2012 with a renewed commitment to building leadership on climate change issues on both sides of the Pacific. We will dedicate resources to three program initiatives:

• A Leadership Institute on Climate Change for Emerging Leaders from Myanmar;
• A Campaign to Support the Launch of PISA's "Young Climate Leaders", a one-year intensive curriculum that will bring young policy-makers, researchers, and civil society leaders to George Washington University to study how to design, evaluate, and fund effective climate change policies and strategies using an integrated, multi-disciplinary approach;
• A Climate Security Research Project in Collaboration with Singapore Management University (SMU) that will assemble a multi-disciplinary team of researchers from the George Washington University (GWU) and SMU. The project will target policy-making communities on both sides of the Pacific along with civil society organizations, research institutes and universities. The knowledge products generated by this project will shape critical dialogue on climate change policy, challenge current conceptual security frames that narrowly define security in state-centric terms, and support leadership on climate adaptation strategies that build resilience.

In 2012, PISA will actively engage in building bridges to enhance cooperation among stakeholders - we encourage dialogue so that vital information is not pigeonholed.  Identifying and advancing emerging issue areas within the rubric of climate change enables us to spur scholarship that can be used to advance climate change research in social science and find practical applications for adaptation strategies and policy dialogue. We invite you to join us in this endeavor.

Sincerely,

Linda J. Yarr