EDGE is built around four main working packages (WP).
WP 1 covers joint research activities, events and projects pertaining to environmental diplomacy and geopolitics. These included first and foremost the organization of annual conferences: the first annual conference was held in Liège in November 2016 and we were proud to see that it attracted more than 600 scholars from all around the world. It also initiated the foundation of the Hugo Observatory to be the leading research institute in the field of environmental migration. The second EDGE conference Politics of the Earth took place in Paris in December 2017 and the final EDGE conference named Digitalization and Smart Green (R)evolution was held in Bratislava in November 2018. Researchers also presented their work at various prestigious fora such as at the COP 22 climate negotiations in Marrakech in November 2016, at the KNOMAD meeting at World Bank in Washington in May 2016. The separate EDGE panel at the ISA conference in Hong Kong in June 2017, or at the AAG in New Orleans in April 2018 are just two examples of how closely the researchers from the three universities worked together within the project.
WP2 fostered cooperation and exchanges of faculty and students between the three partners. Shortly after the beginning of the project, EUBA and ULg as well as Sciences Po and ULg signed bilateral cooperation agreements that would allow for students exchanges in the future. These agreements will outlast the project, and complement the one that existed already between Sciences Po and EUBA. Together, they form the foundation of a durable cooperation between the three universities. Only six months after the launch of the project, the first student exchange took place between Sciences Po and EUBA. A major success was the first EDGE international summer school, which had been organized at Sciences Po in September 2016. Despite the very short window of time available for the organization, between March and September 2016, more than 30 international students took part and was dedicated to the ‘politics of the Earth’. The second edition of the summer school was held in September 2017 in Bratislava celebrating biodiversity, water, forests and bio-agriculture and the last was organized by ULg in September 2018, focusing on environmental changes and migration.
WP3 aimed at reinforcement of the EDGE activities such as changes in curricula: ULg for example reshuffled its Master’s degree in climate science thanks to the inputs of EDGE. The EUBA has announced new courses that deal with the climate change and introduced the environmental dimension also into various other courses. The rotating Chair in Environmental Diplomacy was also implemented. In the Spring of 2016, professor Clive Hamilton from Charles Sturt University in Australia took the honor, EUBA nominated Dr. Alex De Sherbinin from Columbia University, USA, and ULg drafted Prof. Emeritus Roger Zetter from University of Oxford, UK.
WP4 publicized the results of the project and increased the international appeal of EUBA mainly through joint publication strategy developed between the three universities. First, the annual edition of The State of Environmental Migration, in completely reshuffled format, was published by the University Press of Liège. Second, François Gemenne from Sciences Po has been invited to join the board of Journal of International Relations, the journal run by the Faculty of International Relations at the EUBA. The EDGE special issue in the journal came out March 2018. Third, Sciences Po University Press has commissioned an Atlas of the Anthropocene, to be published in August 2019, to the researchers of the project. The EDGE team drafted together also the Guidance paper for the Republic of Maldives in February 2019 that summarizes tailor-made recommendations for the Maldives foreign and environmental policies as resulted from the EDGE workshop in February 2019.
