Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory from 30 November to 3 December 1982, the tenth general assembly of the European Geophysical Society in Louvain-la-Neuve from 30 July to 4 August 1984, the IUGG symposium Contribution of Geophysical Sciences to Climate Change Studies in Vancouver in August 1987, the symposium Climate and Geo-Sciences, a Challenge for Science and Society for the 21st Century in Louvain-la-Neuve in May 1988, the symposium Climate and Ozone at the Dawn of the third Millennium in honour of Paul Crutzen, Nobel Prize 1995, of Willi Dansgaard and Nicholas Shackleton, Crafoord Prize 1995 and, with Claude Lorius, Tyler Prize for Environment 1996, the Milutin Milankovitch anniversary symposia in Belgrade in 2004 and 2009, the first Colloque à l'étranger du Collège de France at the Palais des Académies in Bruxelles on 8–9 May 2006 (with J. Reisse and Jean-Pierre Changeux), the Third von Humboldt International Conference on East Asian Monsoon, Past, Present and Future, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing from 24 to 30 August 2007 (with Z. Ding) . In 2009, a special issue of Climate of the Past was published in his honour with a preface dedicated to his work. In Belgium, he is a co-founding member (with Alain Hubert and Hugo Decleir, 1999) and member of the Administration Council of the International Polar Foundation, member of Mgr Lemaître Foundation (1995), member of Fonds Léopold III de Belgique for the Exploration and Conservation of Nature, of the Scientific Council of GreenFacts, administrator of the Fondation Hoover Louvain and member of the National Committee of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) which he was the president from 2000 to 2004, of the National Committee of the International Geosphere-Biospere Programme on Global Change (IGBP), of the National Committee for Quaternary Research (BELQUA), of the National Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR) and of the National Committee of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) Awards 2010 Prix Georges Lemaître of the Amis et Anciens de l'UCL and of the Fondation Louvain 2008 Winner of an Advanced Investigators Grant of the European Research Council 2007 Foreign member of the Academy of Science of the Royal Society of Canada (MSRC-FRSC) 2006 Foreign member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts 2004 Special recognition to distinguished Belgian scholars from the World Cultural Council 2003 Associate member of the Royal Astronomical Society, Londres 2003 Membre titulaire de l'Académie Nationale de l'Air et