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Transformations to sustainability
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Journal articles, books and other publications

Conde, M., Walter, M. 2022. Knowledge Co-Production in Scientific and Activist Alliances: Unsettling Coloniality, Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2022.479

Trejo-Rangel, M.A., Marchezini, V., Rodriguez, D.A. and da Silva Oliveira, M. (2021), “Participatory 3D model to promote intergenerational engagement for disaster risk reduction in São Luiz do Paraitinga, Brazil”, Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 30 No. 3, pp. 308-326. https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-08-2020-0262

Trejo-Rangel, M.A., Mota Ferreira, A., Marchezini, V., Rodriguez, D.A., Oliveira, M.d.S. and Messias dos Santos, D. (2022), “Giving voice to the voiceless: connecting graduate students with high school students by incubating DRR plans through participatory mapping“, Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 31 No. 2, pp. 124-133. https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-03-2021-0100

H2O-T2S & SPA Bhopal. 2022. Transforming Periurban Futures. Policy Report. Outcomes of an online science-policy conference, January 18-19, 2022. SaciWATERs, SPA Bhopal, Delft University of Technology and University of Cologne. March 2022.

  • H2O-T2S & SPA Bhopal. 2022. Policy Brief No. 1: Transforming periurban futures
  • H2O-T2S & SPA Bhopal. 2022. Policy Brief No. 2: Water management in the periurban
  • H2O-T2S & SPA Bhopal. 2022. Policy Brief No. 3: Gender in the Periurban
  • H2O-T2S & SPA Bhopal. 2022. Policy Brief No. 4: Periurban Spaces as Riskscapes

Transforming Periurban Futures: Conference Report

Blogs and other publications from around the web

Miguel Angel Trejo-Rangel, Victor Marchezini, Daniel Messias dos Santos, Marina Gabos Medeiros and José Carlos Luzia Rodrigues, Social innovations to enhance disaster risk reduction in São Luiz do Paraitinga, Brazil, PreventionWeb

Luciana Massaro, Reunited at last! News from the Gold Matters workshop

Esther van de Camp, Scenario Planning with small-scale gold miners in Busia District (Uganda)

Videos and webinars

All sessions from the ‘Transforming Periurban Futures in India’ conference are now available to watch online.

In the press…

The Waterproofing Data workshop to launch the mobile application ‘Dados à Prova d’Água’ was reported in Noticias do Acre and Gazeta do Norte (in Brazilian Portuguese).

IPACST Advisory Board Meeting

In early May 2022 the T2S-IPACST project team hosted a hybrid, two-day Advisory Board meeting at the University of Cambridge (UK), bringing together the IPACST Advisory Board members, who are senior academic scholars and experts in the field of intellectual property (IP) and sustainability, and the international IPACST project team members.

The purpose of the meeting was to seek expert opinion on the selected key IPACST findings derived from the 28 in-depth case studies of sustainable companies, and the likely policy instruments emerging from these findings. Tapping into the rich expertise and experience of the international and interdisciplinary Board members proved to be a fruitful endeavor for the IPACST project, and the project team thanks all the Board members for their valuable time, and effort in guiding the project throughout its journey.

The final IPACST event will take place as a part of the EPIP 2022 conference, organized this year in Cambridge jointly by the Innovation and IP Management (IIPM) Laboratory and the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL), with IPACST as one of the partners.

By Luciana Constantino, Agência FAPESP 

Several natural disasters have afflicted various parts of Brazil since 2022 began, from deadly flooding and mudslides due to abnormally heavy rain in the states of Minas Gerais, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, to severe drought in Rio Grande do Sul state. However, only 6.1% of its 5,568 municipalities have plans of any kind to mitigate the risk and impact of such disasters, according to a survey by IBGE, the national census and statistics bureau.

An article published in the journal Disaster Prevention and Management describes a project that could contribute to future disaster prevention programs. Supported by FAPESP, the study used a methodology involving participation by inhabitants of the areas concerned, particularly young people, to predict the risks and effects of floods, landslides and rainstorms.

The aim was to develop a participatory process involving secondary school students, whose proposals were to be taken into consideration by local disaster response planners. Twenty-two students enrolled at Monsenhor Ignácio Gioia State School in São Luiz do Paraitinga, São Paulo state, between 2019 and 2021 took part in the project, alongside higher education students enrolled in the Program of Graduate Studies in Natural Disasters at São Paulo State University (UNESP), partnering with the National Disaster Surveillance and Early Warning Center (CEMADEN).

São Luiz do Paraitinga, an important tourism destination in the Paraíba Valley area with a well-conserved historic center listed as a national cultural heritage site and a long tradition of popular religious festivals, was partially destroyed in 2010 by flooding that reached 12 meters in depth in parts of the municipality. Reconstruction was followed by investment in river de-silting and hillside stabilization, among other projects.

“Until then the third step in the stairs leading up to the mother church was the highest level reached by the Paraitinga River whenever it overflowed. The 2010 New Year’s Day flood covered the church and swept away 100-year-old listed buildings. Despite the destruction, no one died, thanks largely to whitewater rafters who lived in the town and rescued more than 400 people during the night, even before the arrival of emergency workers. That shows the importance of popular participation,”

Victor Marchezini, sociologist, CEMADEN researcher and principal investigator for the project, told Agência FAPESP.

In his PhD research conducted shortly after the disaster, Marchezini analyzed the barriers to local participation during reconstruction and argued for the implementation of methodologies to involve local communities in disaster prevention programs.

“Without this involvement, people aren’t prepared and disaster responses are improvised,” he said. “We used São Luiz do Paraitinga as a living laboratory to think about prevention.”

In Brazil, at least 8.3 million inhabitants of 872 municipalities live in high-risk areas, according to the last census conducted by IBGE. Although the National Civil Protection and Defense Policy (PNPDEC, Law 12,608/2012) calls for community participation in civil defense-related preparedness, mitigation and recovery plans, there are no mechanisms in the law to promote this participation. Only 6.8% of Brazil’s municipalities told IBGE they had community-based civil protection units.

Participation by school students

The school students who participated were given training and used aerial photographs of São Luiz do Paraitinga taken by drones to identify areas prone to flooding and landslides. They were asked to decide which segments of the community were most exposed to these risks, and concluded, for example, that their own school was vulnerable, as well as a primary school and an old age home. They plotted flood-prone and other high-risk areas on a map of the town, also using information on the areas flooded in 2010.

“These youngsters who participated in the mapping exercise were too small at the time to remember various aspects of the great flood, and we provided ways and means for one generation to learn from another,” Marchezini said.

The students used the mapping exercise to plan escape routes from future disasters and were asked to form five breakout groups that would plan and budget for disaster risk mitigation measures. Their proposals were shared with the local civil defense team and with Akarui, a non-governmental organization that promotes community involvement in São Luiz do Paraitinga.

The work with the school students was led by Daniel Messias dos Santos, a teacher at their secondary school and last author of the article. The first author is Miguel Angel Trejo-Rangel, a PhD candidate at the National Space Research Institute (INPE).

The main actions suggested by the students were setting up a communication committee for the municipalities in the Paraitinga River basin, which include Cunha; territorial planning to stop people from building in high-risk areas; developing a smartphone app for messaging on disaster response initiatives; and drafting a preparedness plan with the community.

The results were presented at an event held in October 2021 and attended by school students and representatives of the municipal government, civil defense, and other agencies involved (a video of the event can be watched here). Mayor Ana Lúcia Bilard Sicherle, who had also been the mayor in 2010, spoke about the importance of surveillance and monitoring to make sure no one moves back into the high-risk areas. “We now have a stronger civil defense team as well as more monitoring mechanisms,” she said.

The methodology developed by the researchers will be included in CEMADEN Education, a program that takes information and projects to schools with the aim of raising awareness of disaster hazards. The program has been recognized as an inspiring practice by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Research conducted in Brazil and elsewhere evidences the link between climate change and extremely heavy rainfall (more at: agencia.fapesp.br/37088 and revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/en/risk-of-more-natural-disasters).

The article “Giving voice to the voiceless: connecting graduate students with high school students by incubating DRR plans through participatory mapping” is at: www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/DPM-03-2021-0100/full/html.

 


This text was originally published by FAPESP Agency according to Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND. Read the original here.

In May 2022 the T2SGS: Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability conference was represented at the international conference “Groundwater, Key to the Sustainable Development Goals”, organized by French Chapter of the International Association of Hydrogeologists, UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme, and the French Water Partnership (FWP), under the patronage of the French National Commission for UNESCO and with the support of the French Ministry of the Ecological Transition, the Seine-Normandy Water Agency, and Sorbonne University.

T2SGS team members Uma Aslekar and Amin Saidani presented case studies from the project during a session on Community Governance of Groundwater through Managed Recharge and Use: cases in Algeria and India. Uma Aslekar presented a case study on Participatory groundwater management in Randullabad village from western India. There were 6 other case studies from Algeria, Ethiopia, Morocco and Tunisia.

More information about the conference is available online.

The Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden, and Leiden University, the Netherlands, together with the Ghana Studies Association, are co-hosting an exclusive launch of the exhibition “Gold Matters”, in Tamale, Ghana, in July and August 2022. The exhibition will be launched at the Ghana Studies Association Triennial conference on 18th July.

The exhibition features new works by the photographer, Nii Obodai, Director of NUKU Studio in Accra. The exhibition portrays gold mining lives and landscapes in images created by the Gold Matters project, which explores issues of sustainability and transformation in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining.

More details coming soon.

In April 2022 the Ethnografilm Festival, a festival of non-fiction and ethnografilm film which is co-sponsored by the International Science Council (ISC), hosted a series of short films produced by ISC in two different contexts: the research projects composing the T2S programme, and the ISC-BBC Storyworks ‘Unlocking Science‘ series.

The Gold Matters project film “Gold Matters in Burkina Faso: The Art of Bonding in Precarious Times” was shown first. and received positive feedback from the audience of film producers.

Questions from the audience concerned mostly the historical and socio-political context in which the film was shot (namely, the security situation and the working conditions in gold mining areas of northern Burkina Faso), the use of visual and filmed material in research and the prospects for sustainability in the artisanal mining sector.

The IPACST project team recently won a British Council grant to pilot test a multidisciplinary teaching module for educating Indian graduate students on ‘Intellectual Property for Sustainability as p

This project will be based partly on findings from the T2S-IPACST project, integrated with the domain expertise of partner institutes to teach new ways of thinking and responsibly managing IP for creating positive social and environmental impact rather than just economic growth.

The project team includes Dr Frank Tietze and Dr Pratheeba Vimalnath, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom; Prof Anjula Gurtoo and Dr Akriti Jain, Indian Institute of Science, India; Dr Uma Urs, Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdom; and Dr Revendranath Tirumalsety, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India.

Journal articles and books

Eleanor Fisher, Eduardo Brondizio, Emily Boyd, Critical social science perspectives on transformations to sustainability, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Vol. 55 2022

Eppinger, E. 2022. Recycling technologies for enabling sustainability transitions of the fashion industry: status quo and avenues for increasing post-consumer waste recycling, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy,18:1,114-128, https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2022.2027122

Raju, E., Boyd, E. & Otto, F. Stop blaming the climate for disasters. Commun Earth Environ 3, 1 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-021-00332-2

Nicolas Regaud, Bastien Alex, François Gemenne. 2022. “La guerre chaude: Enjeux stratégiques du changement climatique.” Presses de Sciences Po

Lorenzo d’Angelo, Robert Jan Pijpers (Eds). 2022. The Anthropology of Resource Extraction

Mehta Lyla, Parthasarathy D., Pickard Justin, Srivastava Shilpi. 2022. The Political Ecology of COVID-19 and Compounded Uncertainties in Marginal Environments, Frontiers in Human Dynamics, Vol. 4. DOI:10.3389/fhumd.2022.840942

Publications from around the web

Frank Tietze, Intellectual Property for Net Zero — COP26 observations, 10 November 2021

Frank Tietze, IP for Net Zero @COP26 — Continued, 12 November 2021

IPACST published four new Knowledge briefs on IP sharing models for increasing sustainability impact:

  • Sustainability FRAND Licensing Knowledge Brief
  • IPR Pledge Knowledge Brief
  • Defensive Publishing Knowledge Brief
  • Social Licensing Knowledge Brief 

The latest T2S Knowledge Brief, on the Transformative potential of managed retreat in the face of rising sea levels, was published at the end of January 2022.

Videos and podcasts

MISTY partner François Gemenne was interviewed for Carnegie Europe on ‘Russia’s Ukraine Invasion and Climate Change Go Hand in Hand‘ and participated in the event ‘Unpacking the IPCC Report: Climate Change and the Way Forward, which is available to watch online:




MISTY partner Ed Carr was interviewed for the Challenge. Change. podcast on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II’s contribution to its Sixth Assessment Report, for which he was a lead author:

And for the S&P Global ESG Insider podcast on IPCC climate report warns Transformational change is no longer optional

Podcast “Two IPs in a Pod” on IP and sustainability: How can IP help encourage and incentivise sustainable innovation?

Elisabeth Eppinger and Frank Tietze joined the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys podcast ‘Two IPs in a Pod’ on IP and Sustainability, to talk about the IPACST project, explaining why IP is important in bringing climate change solutions to market and how different IP models can accelerate sustainable transitions.

In the press…

François Gemenne was interviewed by France 24 for ‘Climate migrants could face a world of closing doors‘.

MISTY partner Ed Carr was cited in:

Dharna Noor, The effects of climate change are worse than we thought, an unflinching new UN report finds, 28 February 2022, The Boston Globe

Climate Change Is Harming the Planet Faster Than We Can Adapt, U.N. Warns, 28 February 2022, The New York Times

Rebecca Leber, Why climate solutions will fail without the help of social scientists, 1 March 2022, Vox


Photo by Rob Sarmiento on Unsplash




Vulnerable communities around the world could soon be able to use a new mobile phone app to help prevent disastrous floods thanks to a South American ‘citizen science’ pilot.

The new app is one of the key developments of the Waterproofing Data Project, created in partnership with researchers at the University of Glasgow and the University of Warwick in the UK; Heidelberg University in Germany, along with the National Centre for Monitoring Natural Disasters Alerts (Cemaden) and the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Brazil.

The Waterproofing Data app – Dados à Prova D’Água – has been tested by teachers, students, Civil Defence agents and residents in more than 20 local municipalities in Brazil.

While developed in Brazil, the research team hope to roll out this model globally to engage citizens around the world to generate flooding and rainfall data in their own countries that can be used to tackle the global climate crisis.

The app came out of a collaborative design process where community members actively shaped how the app works. It creates a ‘citizen scientist’ monitoring network by enabling them to generate data about rainfall and local flood impacts while showing them a visualisation of all the data, including those from official sources.

Professor João Porto de Albuquerque, Deputy Director of the Urban Big Data Centre, University of Glasgow, and project lead, said:

“The Waterproofing Data project reached a milestone today with the release of a mobile application and school model curriculum, after successfully testing them with more than 300 school students and professionals working in civil protection in nine cities in Brazil. The mobile app draws on research results obtained by a transdisciplinary international research team in Brazil, Germany and the UK in co-production with flood-prone communities and institutional stakeholders in Brazil. It will enable schools and communities throughout Brazil to work with our partners at Cemaden (the National Centre for Disaster Monitoring and Early-Warning) to combine citizen science and urban analytics to adapt to climate extreme events and prevent the devastating impacts of flooding which have happened year after year in Brazil.”

The research also discovered clear educational benefits to young people in at-risk communities. Students learnt how to make rainfall gauges with plastic bottles and to use the Waterproofing Data mobile app to record their rainfall measurements and the impacts on their neighbourhood. They also learnt to use digital mapping tools such as OpenStreetMap. Empowering them to become citizen scientists helped them understand flooding risks and the effect of climate change on their neighbourhoods while also generating valuable data for flood management agencies.

The app and curriculum – initiatives developed in collaboration with the communities at risk – make flood data accessible, raise awareness of flood risks, and encourage participation in the design of new initiatives to reduce disaster risks.

Climate change is causing extreme weather events to become more frequent and more severe, devastating communities with high poverty levels, such as deprived areas of Brazil and Latin America. These neighbourhoods are often more vulnerable to natural hazards due to rapid urbanisation, location within flood-prone areas, and a lack of durable housing, water and sanitation infrastructure, or natural drainage. 8.3 million people in Brazil are estimated to live in these at-risk areas. Lack of sufficient data about rainfall and floods – alongside the varying physical and social characteristics of neighbourhoods – can make it difficult to predict when floods may occur.

Improving the capacity of these communities to cope with these risks can make cities more resilient to extreme weather events and reduce the social and economic impacts of these disasters, which the World Bank estimates have cost Brazil R$336 billion (£48 billion) from 1995 to 2019.

The Waterproofing Data (WPD) project explored how to build resilience by encouraging communities to generate the data used to predict when floods will occur.

  • For more information contact Rhiannon Law, Business and Communications Officer, Urban Big Data Centre, University of Glasgow
  • Learn more about the project, through the Waterproofing Data Project animation – https://youtu.be/jJdahrmiTXk
  • Download the Dados à Prova D’Água (Waterproofing Data) App at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dadosaprovadagua.wpdmobileapp

In March 2022, the project organized a workshop to launch the mobile application “Dados à Prova d’Água“, which is used as a tool in the elective course “Dados à Prova d’Água” that was also launched in March. The elective course aims to bring school communities closer to issues related to data, disasters and actions to reduce disaster risks at the local level. In the workshop, researchers, practitioners, teachers, citizens and other institutions involved in disaster management were invited to discuss the potential of the mobile application and the elective course to engage citizens in data production, circulation and use in order to improve communities’ resilience against disasters. The workshop was reported by the National Center for Monitoring and Alerting of Natural Disasters (CEMADEN) and in Noticias do Acre and Gazeta do Norte (in Brazilian Portuguese).

Sheila Jasanoff, who is a Principal Investigator for the Governance of Sociotechnical Transformations (GoST) project, has been awarded the 2022 Holberg Prize for her groundbreaking research in science and technology studies (STS).

Sheila Jasanoff

Sheila Jasanoff is the Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. She will receive the award during a ceremony at the University of Bergen, Norway, on 9 June.

Jasanoff is a pioneer in the field of STS, which examines the creation, development, and consequences of science and technology in their historical, cultural, and social contexts. As explained in the Holberg Prize announcement, Jasanoff’s most recent theoretical innovation is the idea of sociotechnical imaginaries: the collectively held visions of desirable futures that societies hope to attain through advances in science and technology.

The concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, or collectively held visions of technological futures, is used in the GoST project to make sense of how imaginations of transformation help shape societal choices, in particular with regards to energy systems, agriculture, and urban digital infrastructures in countries of the Global South.

Find out more about the GoST project.


Photo: Martha Stewart, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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  • T2S Coordination Office

    Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)
    Email: T2S@nwo.nl
    Postal address: PO Box 93461
    NL-2509 AL The Hague
    The Netherlands

  • Visiting address

    Laan van Nieuw Oost-Indië 300
    NL-2593 CE  The Hague
    The Netherlands

  • Grant Agreement

    This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 730211.
  • Links

    • www.belmontforum.org
    • www.norface.net