The document summarizes two sustainability conferences organized by the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU). The first event in October 2014 was the IARU Sustainability Science Congress & Sustainable Campus Conference which had over 700 researchers from 50 countries discuss topics like biodiversity, energy, food, and water. The second event in December 2016 was the IARU Global University Climate Forum which had 27 student teams from over 30 countries develop climate solutions and receive peer feedback. Both conferences aimed to foster dialogue around sustainability between universities.
6. SESSIONS: Biodiversity Biomass Economy
Sustainability
education
Energy
Feeding future
generations
From “climate” to
“sustainability”
From knowledge to
action
Governance in light
of planetary
boundaries
Sustainability-
health interactions
Human-earth
relationship
Sustainable
nutrient
management
Social equity,
development and
global environment
Urbanisation Water
16. Next steps:
Collect updates
and foster peer-
to-peer dialogue
for one year
Finalize projects
in December
Publish final
report early in
2017
Offer peer review
publication to
teams that
qualify
Julian Agyeman
Jane Lubchenco
Peter Bakker
Shiyi Chen
Johan Rockström
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Danish Prime Minister
Guido Schmidt-Traub
These were the plenary topics, which I think we can all agree are of real interest to sustainability offices as well as academics.
And these are the session topics, which I think we can all agree are of real interest to sustainability offices as well as academics.
In October IARU hosted a faculty-led scientific congress.
This was an amazing event with headliners like the Danish Prime Minister and Peter Bakker of the WBCSD.
We launched the book in tandem with this. While the conference was inspiring and highlighted global trends and solutions, our conference was intimate – it had around 150 attendees - and was organized in a way that fostered dialogue and action-oriented local solutions.
We used the green guide as the backbone for this event.
We captured much of the dialogue on video, and since then an independent listserv was established.
Next step is that we will use these same categories to develop a series of case studies to showcase our lessons learned.
We just had our meeting last week, so we are in the process of developing our outcome documents and looping in our colleagues who could not attend.
We are also now heading into a meeting with some ISCN representatives to talk through how the two groups might work together