Future Earth Coasts
Heath Kelsey met with the other members of the Future Earth Coasts Executive Committee in Bremen, Germany from September 11-13. Future Earth Coasts’ goal is to strengthen the science-policy interface and contribute to securing sustainable coastal communities. One highlight from the discussions is the next Open Science Conference called ‘Our Coastal Futures’, which will be hosted in October 2020 at the Gold Coast Campus of Southern Cross University in Australia. The conference will focus on integrating all knowledge types, and is an official United Nation endorsed event towards the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.
New Future Earth Coasts survey on coastal sustainability
The Tour de Coasts survey by Future Earth Coasts has just launched and is looking for you to share your thoughts and help shape the future of coastal sustainability! This survey explores global priorities, challenges, and opportunities in coastal sustainability. Your input is pivotal for the Future Earth Coasts network. To take the survey, please click here.
Highlights from the SRI Conference in Helsinki, Finland
Alexandra Fries, Heath Kelsey, Vanessa Vargas-Nguyen, and Bill Dennison attended Sustainability Research and Innovation Congress in Helsinki, Finland from June 10-14th. They facilitated several workshops on science communication and stakeholder engagement. They also collaborated with partners from University of South Carolina, University of Bergen, and Future Earth Coasts. The conference was a great venue to advance IAN’s thinking on sustainability and working to solve global challenges. Also, the synthesis and communication that IAN products accomplish was mentioned as an asset that is greatly needed to impact policy-making and improve natural resource management.
IAN attends Future Earth General Assembly meeting in Helsinki, Finland
As the Future Earth Coasts (FEC) US International Project Office lead, Heath Kelsey attended the Future Earth General Assembly meeting in Helsinki, along with FEC Executive Director, Dr. Xiaoyu Fang, from East China Normal University in Shanghai, China. Two full days of meetings addressed the science and research directions for Future Earth, along with business and management questions. Highlights were the discussion around science and research needs from a global perspective. Of special interest were discussions around the issue of scale—how can global research questions be translated into action at the local scale? And of course, meeting Xiaoyu in person for the first time was the highlight of the whole trip!
Working towards a sustainable future at SRI 2025
The fifth annual Sustainability Research & Innovation Congress (SRI) was held in Chicago, Illinois and virtually from June 16–19th. The theme this year was “Shaping a Sustainable Future” and included over 1200 attendees representing over 80 countries. The conference also encompassed some of the following sub-themes throughout the week: hope, actions, solutions, community, collaboration, and resilience. Several IAN staff were in attendance to host workshops about science communication and storytelling, co-producing socio-environmental report cards, and strategies for effective stakeholder engagement. The conference highlighted key global sustainability challenges and the multitude of approaches to solving them, notably through inclusive practices that go beyond the typical scientific research framework.