On Thursday, India announced the first 20 cities to receive funding to become ‘Smart Cities’. It’s a high profile mission to modernise and transform urban infrastructure, especially using digital technologies like sensor networks and data centres. Smart cities are one response to the huge challenges facing urban India. The conference on pathways to sustainable urbanisation,…
What would a sustainable city look like?
From Dragon Heads to Farm Drops, Chinese agriculture has many faces
In Beijing last week, STEPS member Adrian Ely hosted a roundtable with social enterprises, NGOs and firms involved in food and agriculture to discuss the findings of the Low Carbon Innovation in China: Prospects, Politics and Practice project. Based on fieldwork by Sam Geall (SPRU), and support from Yiching Song (Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy,…
South Asia Sustainability Hub launched in Delhi
The economist Nitin Desai, the environmentalist Sunita Narain and the writer P. Sainath spoke at the South Asia Sustainability Hub & Knowledge Network launch event on 28 January in Delhi. The new hub joins five other hubs around the world in the Pathways to Sustainability Global Consortium, which the STEPS Centre convened to link up…
India’s seed sector is flourishing. Could African farmers benefit?
Africa’s farmers need quality seeds but the seed sector in Africa has often struggled to meet this need. The continent’s share in the global seed trade is very low, seed markets often aren’t supported, and the supply of quality seeds and improved crop varieties is weak. Poor seed supply threatens agriculture’s ability to play its…
How do we end the dominance of rich countries over sustainability science?
by Patrick van Zwanenberg, Anabel Marin & Adrian Ely With the new Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the UN last year, SciDev.Net has published a timely report on the global status of sustainability science. Sustainability science (defined as ‘research that supports and drives sustainable development’) is growing significantly as a proportion of world scientific output,…
Four neglected challenges for China’s low carbon future
Last year ended with a momentous political step forward on climate change. The Paris Agreement, signed at the COP21 climate conference in December, requires countries to work together to meet and surpass their ‘intended nationally determined contributions’ (INDCs) with an objective of limiting global average temperature change to 2⁰C, and an aspiration of keeping within…
Workshop: Climate Change and Uncertainty from Above and Below
27-28 January 2016 New Delhi, India Uncertainty is often considered to be a “super wicked problem” or “monster” by scientists and policy makers. The integration of uncertainty in climate change decision-making is very much debated and disputed by scientists. Often, the reaction has been to view it as something that needs to be minimised and…
International Conference: Pathways to Sustainable Urbanisation
29-30 January 2016 Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India Cities in India and other South Asian nations are in the midst of experiencing rapid urbanization. In this time of growth, safeguarding environmental integrity and social justice will be decisive for the health and livelihoods of citizens. This conference focused on the possibilities for sustainable urban…
Bats, people and a complex web of disease transmission
By Kate Jones and Liam Brierley It might seem strange that after millennia of human history, outbreaks of new, ’emerging’ diseases that we’ve never seen before still regularly occur around the world, some of which go on to become pandemic. However, this may not be so surprising considering how quickly and how intensively the world…
In search of transformations at COP21
The International Social Science Council has published interviews from the COP21 climate conference with three researchers who are part of their ‘Transformations to Sustainability programme’. The interviewees include STEPS researcher Adrian Ely, and Cosmas Ochieng, director of ACTS, one of the institutions in the STEPS Africa Sustainability Hub. The Africa hub was an important partner…