The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development aside from providing a framework to sustainability and equality, can also represent how to better link basic science and education with issues such as climatic and environmental change, water and energy security, ocean preservation, disaster risk and other existential risks to living sustainably on planet Earth. While we celebrate the International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development (IYBSSD), it is important to recognize the contribution basic science can make to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. The International Year, promulgated by the United Nations, encourages exchanges between scientists and all categories of stakeholders, whether from grassroots communities or political decisionmakers and international leaders, to associations, students and local authorities.
GeoUnions (a group of nine unions and associations representing the geosciences, who are also members of the ISC), established a “Distinguished Lecture Series on Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development” aligned with the IYBSSD to highlight the importance of basic sciences for sustainable development within the ISC community.
To promote discussion and debate around these issues, the ISC will convene three online webinars on 21 February, 21 March and 18 April 2023, to discuss rethinking environmental security for the 21st century; disaster risk reduction and interdependencies between vulnerability, exposure, and hazards; and how we can consider the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda from a data-driven geographical perspective. Our speakers, Simon Dalby, Irasema Alcántara-Ayala and Chen Jun invite you to engage this conversation.
Webinar 1 : “Apprehending the Duality of Disaster Risk and Sustainable Development”
Although certainly nothing erodes sustainable development more than a disaster, the root causes of disaster risk, and therefore of disasters, are political, socio-economic, institutional and environmental factors often linked to skewed development models. The complex duality of disaster risk and sustainable development requires an understanding that goes indeed beyond a single discipline. Nevertheless, the nurtured perspective of geographic knowledge provides significant and elementary principles to apprehend and address the multidimensions of the humanized landscape within the sphere of the prevailing socio-territorial challenges. The objective of this Lecture is to give a powerful impetus to reflection and actions on disaster risk reduction and global sustainability in an era of unprecedented socio-environmental changes, in which the leading role of geography as a compass to support transdisciplinary approaches to strengthen policy formulation and practice is indispensable.
Irasema Alcántara-Ayala
| Former Director and current Professor and Researcher at the Institute of Geography of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and ISC Fellow (appointed in December 2022). Her research seeks to understand the root causes and drivers of disaster risk through forensic investigations of disasters, and to promote integrated research on disaster risk. She is particularly interested in bridging the gap between science and policy making and practice in the developing world. She has previously served as member of the Committee of Scientific Planning and Review (CSPR) of the International Science Council (ISC, former ICSU); as Vice-President of the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk programme of the International Science Council (ISC-IRDR), of the International Geographical Union (IGU), of the International Consortium on Landslides (ICL), and of the International Association of Geomorphologists (IAG). She has also been an associate of the Board of Directors of the Global Alliance of Disaster Research Institutes (GADRI).
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You can register for the first webinar HERE.