Unpacking Sustainability, Resilience and Equity
The 4th CSD Annual Conference on Sustainable Development 2019, organized by CSD-ULAB, will bring together local and international experts from across the globe to explore the latest and most pressing issues relating to the Sustainable Development Agenda. The focus of this year’s conference is on unpacking some of the key issues that pose as challenges in achieving sustainability.
The changing climate of our current world poses challenges to practically every domain of human society, from agriculture to urban planning. It remains unclear, however, how measures taken to strengthen the capacity of society to adapt to a warming world can simultaneously carry forward the wider Sustainability Agenda enshrined in the Sustainable Development Goals.
First among these concerns is the need to promote equitable outcomes, ensuring that the poorest and most marginalized groups, including women and minorities, can access the resources they need to reverse the entrenched exclusion that continues to make them the most vulnerable to a changing climate. This is among the most wicked of wicked problems, and constitutes a vital and wide ranging research agenda for the decades ahead, both in Bangladesh and across the world.
This years conference sessions include addressing resilience and equity, identifying pro-poor technology and innovation in coastal development, exploring circular design solutions for sustainable production, health and well-being of urban communities and understanding the data gaps in addressing specific SDG goals.
Objectives of the Conference:
This interdisciplinary conference has a clear focus on public policy impact, identifying cutting edge research with clear and urgent implications for the current national and international policy debate. There is a strong emphasis on fostering collaboration between crosscutting disciplines such as anthropology, urban planning, climate and natural sciences, and economics/business studies.
More than half of the world’s population live in cities and this is expected to increase to sixty eight percent by 2050. In Bangladesh, more than thirty five percent of the population is living in urban settings. Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, is one of the most densely populated cities of the world and problems like urban heat stress, lack of green spaces, air and water pollution, heart and lung diseases are prominent here. Therefore, enhancing urban livability has become a matter of great concern not only for urban planners, policy makers but also for urban researchers and academicians. Livable urban environments integrate physical and social well-being parameters to sustain a productive and meaningful existence of city dwellers. “Sustainability” and “sustainable development” are concepts that closely aligned with the term “Livability” and sometimes used reciprocally.
Sustainable urban environment, healthy communities and livability are closely connected because the built and natural environments where people live are characterized by social, economic, political and demographic characteristics of the inhabitants. Therefore, the determinants of urban livability, sustainable urban development and healthy communities are profoundly related, for instance, the accessibility to air and water pollution free environment, open and green spaces, proper health care, healthy neighbourhood relationship. Finally, this session on livable cities will focus on the below mentioned sub themes to answer the question “how to make any built urban environment whether a city or a town truly livable?”
Sub themes
Objectives of the session
Please submit your abstract Here by 20th September, 2019. If you have any questions, feel free to contact: [email protected]
The concept of circular economy has direct connection with the sustainable development concept. It requires a balanced coordination with the economic, environmental, technological, and social aspects of a process. The definition provided by Ellen McArthur Foundation: Circular economy is an industrial system that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design. It replaces the ‘end-of-life’ concept with restoration, shifts towards the use of renewable energy, eliminates the use of toxic chemicals, which impair reuse, and aims for the elimination of waste through the superior design of materials, products, systems, and, within this, business models.
This session will address the overall question on how we can incorporate circular design and build sustainable institutes. Overall what are the challenges and opportunities in applying the principles of circular economy in Bangladesh? It will assess current practices at individual institutions and industry (e.g. on waste, energy, value chain) and how this fits in with SDG 12 targets on Sustainable Consumption and Production. We will be hearing from experts who are working on recycling plastics and waste, renewable energy and in circular design in the fashion industry.
Objectives of the session
Presentation of original research and case studies that:
We will be publishing a special issue in ‘Current Research in Environmental Sustainability’.
Please submit your abstract Here by 20th September, 2019. If you have any questions, feel free to contact: [email protected]
Coastal regions of Bangladesh are among the most change-prone on earth. The country is a hotspot of climate change related dynamics with particularly strong effects on the coastal region and its people, the Bangladesh coast is the destination for well over a million refugees from neighbouring Myanmar who join large numbers of coastal people already below the poverty line and further impoverished through intruding salinity and other environmental changes. In addition, the economic growth of recent decades has enforced rather than alleviated economic inequalities (see World bank data on Gini coefficients). All this underlines the urgent need for responding and pre-empting poverty-generation.
Appropriate technical and social innovations are needed. Pro-poor innovation development is no easy avenue. Innovations tend to be developed and/or captured by those who already have resources. This session aims to bring together academics from different universities and disciplines, NGOs, diverse government ministries and agencies as well as interested private sector actors. Our common denominator is the desire to link and create synergies between our different types of involvement with pro-poor development.
Objectives of the session
Participants
Invited to the session are academics from different universities and disciplines, diverse government ministries and agencies, NGOs as well as interested private sector actors.
Please submit your abstract Here by 20th September, 2019. If you have any questions, feel free to contact: [email protected]
Resilience as a concept is widely used by practitioners and academics alike, and yet its precise definition remains ambiguous. Commonly viewed as “adaptive capacity”, it is generally applied to “communities” and their ability to respond effectively to both shocks and longer-term trends associated with a changing climate. On closer inspection, however, many “resilience” interventions at the programmatic level are virtually indistinguishable from long standing development practice, both in terms of approach (diversifying livelihoods) and identified outcomes (gender empowerment). As with human mobility, the specific aspects of “resilience” that are solely concerned with the physical impacts of climate change are unclear.
This working paper session aims to better understand the concept in a climate sensitive context where mobility is involved and explore the usability and efficiency of a resilience framework.
The discussions at this session will aim to provide answers to the following questions:
– Does resilience framework provide more clarity to the migration-environment discussion?
– To what extent are long standing trends, including migration, subject to distortions due to the climate change and / or resilience lens?
– What are the risks of “climate change resilience” being employed as an additional narrative and set of operationalised practices to further marginalise poor people and communities as part of ongoing processes of “oppressive” or “reactionary” bricolage?
– What do academics and practitioners who are thinking around climate-related response and programming learn from the climate affected communities?
– Many organisations and coordination structures have ‘environment’ as a cross-cutting theme but how effectively does this meet the needs presented by today’s climate crisis?
It is widely accepted that behavior is a key factor to many social and health problems. Because these problems are rooted in human behavior thus solutions to deal with them also lie in human behavior. In this context, Youth activities can perform vital role to bring behavioral changes. Therefore, Investing in youth is an investment in our future. It is also fundamental for the successful implementation of the global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Young people today are not just recipients of knowledge and values; they have become agents of change through their social awareness and knowledge in new technologies.
Their leadership in their own local contexts has shown to be remarkable, and we believe young people have the potential to design sustainable initiatives in their educational institutions, homes and communities. In order to build meaningful positive changes in behavior, it is essential to gain a thorough understanding of youth’s preferences, interests, background, lifestyle and culture. Through this workshop we will explore their needs and actions towards a healthy planet by ensuring a sustainable consumption pattern.
Going further, Sustainable Development Goal 12 – Ensure Sustainable Consumption and Production patterns – and achieving its targets becomes a priority as it will enable young people to take their future into their own hands with dignity, freedom and responsibility. The challenge for young leaders then, is to design a new educational paradigm that integrates sustainability in lifestyle. Therefore, the aim of this session is to encourage youth to be a designer and design sustainable lifestyle related solutions that are a better fit for people’s lives. This session has been designed to promote importance of changing behavior through reduce waste generation and pollution, prevention, reduction, recycling and reuse.
This session will be conducted two parts, panel discussion by experts followed by breakout group session where the selected participants from different universities will work in groups on SDG 12 targets and role of youth in achieving these targets:
Who can attend: Undergraduate or Postgraduate Students from different Colleges and Universities
If you want to attend the workshop, send a short summary on the following topic (Word Limit: Max 500 words)
How behavioral change can ensure a healthy planet?
If you have any questions, feel free to contact: [email protected]
Deadline: 20th September, 2019
The impacts of a changing climate will not be distributed equally. Those individuals and groups already marginalised by societal norms and laws are more vulnerable than others, with women and girls constituting the most important example. While facing disproportionately higher risks from a changing climate, women are also commonly seen as being essential to addressing the adaptation problem, with gender equality cited by both academics and practitioners as an essential objective if resilience goals are to be met.
This session will explore a number of facets of this problem, with papers presented on the following crucial topics:
Participants
Invited to the session are academics from different universities and disciplines, diverse government ministries and agencies, NGOs as well as interested private sector actors working on gender focused issues.
Please submit your abstract Here by 20th September, 2019. If you have any questions, feel free to contact: samiya.selim@ulab.
Please register for the 4th CSD Annual Conference on Sustainable Development to be held at ULAB, Dhaka on 18-19th October 2019
TASK | DATES |
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1. Opening call for abstract submission | 15th August |
2. Closing date for abstract submission | 15th September |
3. Notification of acceptance to authors | 20th September |
4. Registration opens | 15th August |
SUBCLASS | Amount | |
---|---|---|
International Participants | USD 200 | |
SAARC Participants | USD 150 | |
Local Participants | BDT 2500 | |
Student Participants | BDT 1500 | |
Observers | BDT 1000 | |
Student Observers | No Fee Required |
Kindly contact us for any queries on
[email protected] or [email protected]
Contact no. +88-01715231111