12-15 June 2021: Future Earth Asia community at SRI2021
Future Earth in Asia is actively participating in the Sustainability Research & Innovation Congress 2021 (SRI2021), the world’s first transdisciplinary gathering on sustainability sponsored by Future Earth and the Belmont Forum. SRI2021 will be held from June 12-15, 2021, and will be a forum for intense advocacy of sustainability scholarship, innovation, collaboration, and action.
The conference will feature approximately 20 sessions relevant to Asia (a list of these sessions can be found here).
Some of the selected regional sessions organized by the Future Earth Asia community include the following.
Organizer: Terukazu Kumazawa
The purpose of this session is to identify new thinking frameworks and future scenario design principles for ecological and cultural sustainability through imagining the future and understanding the signs of the future.The key concept is “Fudo(風土)” or “Fudo”-nization. Fudo is a Sino-Japanese term which is almost equivalent to the English term environment, but differs from Western Classical Ontology in the point that it emphasizes the interdependency between subject and surroundings.
How should we aim for ecological and cultural sustainability when our future society is illuminated by this concept? In this session, we hope to find the answer to this question. Nowadays, neither global environmental issues nor decision making about them can be discussed without the involvement of computation and the events in the Internet space. The society of the future is one where humans and computers co-exist. When the interaction between humans and the environment is combined with the virtual world and knowledge processing by computers, the basic concepts of “human” and “nature” may change their definition.
“Sustainability for who?” needs to be deliberated in such a context. Accordingly, it is necessary to capture the network of individual objects that support the existence of humanity and nature, and the interpenetrating relationships that explain the whole as Fudo is just that.
In this session, we will focus on the two aspects of risk and diversity. Concretely, we will report on “signs of the future” through the questionnaire survey targeting the Japanese public and the video production and interactive workshops targeting the local areas in Japan, the efforts to create dialogues about the future society, and the formation of a theory that synthesizes these efforts. These outcomes will be followed by a discussion on the establishment of principles for designing future scenarios based on the ”Fudo” theory of the future society.
7:00 AM – 8:30 AM JST on Monday, 14 June
Organizer: Joon Kim
Radical changes in social-ecological systems (SES) represent growing threats to social base (SB) as well as ecological ceiling (EC). Increasing interdependence of social-ecological health and unintended consequences are highly complex in terms of scale, urgency, equity and policy. Human health depends on flourishing natural ecosystems and wise stewardship of SES, requiring co-production of usable knowledge, implementation of wise policies, and decisive action with visioneering. What should researchers, practitioners and policy-makers know and do about? This was the key question addressed during the recent Future Earth East Asia International Symposium on ‘Social-Ecological Health in Asia,’ at Seoul National University Asia Center, Korea. Almost 200 participants from 12 countries shared their perspectives and experiences, which surfaced two fundamental questions: (1) what is the first principle that will guide us toward sustainability? and (2) how to establish partnership that will link knowledge to action beyond multiple perspectives? An encouraging outcome of the symposium was the initiative to set up the Asia-Pacific regional hub for social-ecological health as a liaison between Future Earth Health KAN and Planetary Health Alliance. To follow up on the above conundrum, we propose a session titled, “Building Asia-Pacific Regional Hub for Social-Ecological Health: Visioneering the Doughnut Economics Trilemma.” The humanity has continued transgressing ECs and we have chosen the lifestyles that are against the natural laws, at the expense of collapses in SB, which have resulted in the COVID-19 pandemic. Complex systems view provides not only the insight on the trilemma (i.e., upper limit of EC, lower limit of SB, and thermodynamic imperative) in coping with the pandemic but also the foresight toward healthy and sustainable SES. The session will use the “doughnut economics” by Kate Raworth as the conceptual framework, and invite contributions to examine its principles and to showcase its applications toward healthy SES from diverse perspectives.
9:00 AM – 10:00 AM JST on Monday, 14 June
Organizer: Rhodora Azanza
The Marginal Seas in South and East Asia provide various ecological, economic and socio- cultural services that supports to almost 620 million people in the region (IMB). Most of its seas play a vital role in the global trade, where major ports are strategically located. However, these important areas are also the most vulnerable in terms various anthropogenic threats, and natural hazards e.g. typhoons, and tsunamis. Thus, these pressures coupled with expanding population resulted to the decline of Ocean Health Index. The proposed session on “Sustainable Marginal Seas of South and East Asia” seeks to utilize available data that could be used to capture the macro scale perspective in understanding various issues and threats of its seas. The proposed session calls for transdisciplinary and transformational studies from modelling, development of application tools, network analyses, and etc., towards sustaining the resources in the marginal seas in the South and East Asia. The objectives of the proposed session are: (1.) Provide a venue for presentation of initiatives/projects on the sustainable development of marginal seas of South and East Asia, (2.) Stimulate discussions on the current and future needs for regional and international Research & Development cooperation on the sustainable utilization of coasts and oceans.
Organizer: SC Candice Lung
Millions of deaths worldwide were attributable to PM2.5 (fine aerosols). Especially in Asia, World Health Organization estimated that ~ 2.2 million premature deaths in the Asia and the Pacific area every year were attributed to household and ambient air pollution. In order to tackle this challenge, low-cost sensors (LCS), an emerging new technology, can be used to study air pollution and health issues to reduce associated health risks, especially for the vulnerable population. LCS can measure local variations in pollutant exposures. In order to promote this research direction, one intensive training workshop focusing on “Air Pollution, Sensors, and Big Data” was held at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan on July 10-14, 2017. Afterwards, discussion workshops and symposia were organized to facilitate regional collaboration. As a result, scientists from 13 countries of the Asia and the Pacific area have joined the “Health Investigation and Air Sensing for Asian Pollution (Hi-ASAP) Initiative” which was endorsed by Regional Centre of Future Earth in Asia as a regional activity in 2019. This initiative aims to conduct research providing policy-relevant findings to reduce PM2.5-associated health risks at national levels. In addition to evaluating health risks from PM2.5, we also want to best utilize the novel LCS in identifying high-PM2.5 areas and high-PM2.5 exposure populations in where governmental monitoring stations are sparsely distributed in these countries. In order to provide an opportunity for Asian researchers to discuss with and gain feedback from NGO representatives and policy makers on their research design, we propose this session titled “Future Earth Regional Activity on Air Pollution Sensing and Health in Asia” in this SRI2021. This session fits with the theme of “Sustainable Solutions from the Global South” and “Integrated Action for the SDGs” since Hi-ASAP aims to reduce health risks (one of SDGs) with substantial participation from Global South countries.
Organizer: Ria Lambino, Hein Mallee
Millions of deaths worldwide were attributable to PM2.5 (fine aerosols). Especially in Asia, World Health Organization estimated that ~ 2.2 million premature deaths in the Asia and the Pacific area every year were attributed to household and ambient air pollution. In order to tackle this challenge, low-cost sensors (LCS), an emerging new technology, can be used to study air pollution and health issues to reduce associated health risks, especially for the vulnerable population. LCS can measure local variations in pollutant exposures. In order to promote this research direction, one intensive training workshop focusing on “Air Pollution, Sensors, and Big Data” was held at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan on July 10-14, 2017. Afterwards, discussion workshops and symposia were organized to facilitate regional collaboration. As a result, scientists from 13 countries of the Asia and the Pacific area have joined the “Health Investigation and Air Sensing for Asian Pollution (Hi-ASAP) Initiative” which was endorsed by Regional Centre of Future Earth in Asia as a regional activity in 2019. This initiative aims to conduct research providing policy-relevant findings to reduce PM2.5-associated health risks at national levels. In addition to evaluating health risks from PM2.5, we also want to best utilize the novel LCS in identifying high-PM2.5 areas and high-PM2.5 exposure populations in where governmental monitoring stations are sparsely distributed in these countries. In order to provide an opportunity for Asian researchers to discuss with and gain feedback from NGO representatives and policy makers on their research design, we propose this session titled “Future Earth Regional Activity on Air Pollution Sensing and Health in Asia” in this SRI2021. This session fits with the theme of “Sustainable Solutions from the Global South” and “Integrated Action for the SDGs” since Hi-ASAP aims to reduce health risks (one of SDGs) with substantial participation from Global South countries.
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