Tuesday 8 November
The Institute for Sustainability Annual Conference will focus on research, policy and practice for the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We will explore the challenges in sustainability research at a range of scales: regional, national and international, to enhance collaboration between academia, industry and policy.
Global challenges for sustainability are highly interconnected and complex requiring integrated solutions — from the local to the global — to achieve sustainable development in the UK, and throughout the world. As the world population is expected to reach 7.7 billion by 2020, climate change presents unprecedented environmental challenges alongside well known ones such as air and water pollution, soil depletion, food scarcity and waste, limited natural resources, and poverty.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals define these outstanding interrelated challenges which the world must meet to create a sustainable future. As there are interlinkages between the goals, the SDGs have considerable potential to create synergies between policies and practices in sustainability.
Agenda
Keynote Speaker: Patrick Paul Walsh, Professor of International Development Studies at University College Dublin & Senior Advisor to UN SDSN, New York
- Session 1 – What is the role of academia in helping to meet the SDGs and where should they have input in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development?
- Session 2 – Addressing global challenges with integrated solutions
- Poster Session – Newcastle University research projects in sustainability
- Session 3 – Roundtable: How to bring research to policy for sustainable development
The first session will identify how academic research could play a greater role in policy and practice for sustainable development, and the second session will introduce research from Newcastle University researchers on addressing global challenges for sustainability with integrated solutions.
The final roundtable will bring together experts in research, policy and practice to identify how academic research and demonstration can inform policy for sustainable development in areas of air quality, energy, food, water, agriculture and waste.
The conference will finish with a roundtable discussion on ‘how to bring research to policy for sustainable development’, involving academics, practitioners and policy makers.