Looking Ahead to Maryland 2050: Living in Our Environment was a unique one day research workshop. By engaging faculty and researchers at College Park from a wide range of disciplines, the workshop aims to:

• Foster interdisciplinary and long range thinking about environment-related issues that are likely to undergo major changes in the State over the next four decades.
• Explore issues central to protecting Maryland 's environmental future and at the same time enhancing the quality of life for its citizens.
• Identify the critical research questions around both global influences and local manifestations of human-environment interactions. 

Why Maryland in 2050?
The workshop will focus on the State of Maryland because of the University’s location and close relationship with the State, and the State’s influence over policies affecting how we live in our environment –- yet our aim is to explore both local and global issues affecting our whole region. The year 2050 represents our sense that a longer time horizon is needed to consider the scale of the global drivers but that it must be bounded somehow, perhaps by the span of the next generation.

Future Participation in the Maryland 2050 Initiative
We also welcome the interest of anyone outside College Park and look forward to engaging a much broader group of academic experts, and policy and investment decision-makers in 2007 as we expand this initiative. Please let us know of your interest by contacting us at cier@umd.edu.

Maryland 2050 is hosted by the Center for Integrative Environmental Research at the University of Maryland in collaboration with a campus-wide planning committee. We wish to thank the Department of Geography at the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences for sponsoring this workshop and helping to launch the Maryland 2050 initiative.