Findings from the IPACST project demonstrate that intellectual property (IP), including both formal IP rights such as patents, trademarks, and copyrights as well as informal IP assets such as data, technical and industrial know-how, forms an integral part of a sustainability-oriented business.

However, businesses acknowledge a general lack of awareness and insufficient guidelines about using IP for facilitating sustainability transition. By combining expert knowledge from strategic IP management, business models, and sustainability fields, the IPACST team has created an open access teaching kit that academics, teachers, industry practitioners, and anyone interested in learning about IP and sustainability can use for free.

The teaching kit includes introductory slides, reading lists, and selected case studies on IP and sustainability. All the teaching kit materials are available for download from the IPACST website as an open access publication distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution By License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

Access the IPACST teaching kit here.

The Innovation and IP Management (IIPM) Laboratory and the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL), University of Cambridge, successfully hosted the European Policy for Intellectual Property (EPIP) 2022 conference on 14-16 September 2022 in Cambridge, with the IPACST project as one of the partners.

The conference was centered around the theme “Opening IP for a better world?” and featured three keynote speeches, three roundtables, nine themed sessions (including those organized by the World IP Organization (WIPO), European Patent Office (EPO), and Licensing Executive Society (LES)), and 149 paper presentations. A total of about 300 participants registered for the conference including 228 in-person participants.

Carlos Correa’s keynote address on international IP regimes, Nobel laureate Gregory Paul Winter’s keynote on IP from an inventor’s perspective, and Séverine Dusollier’s keynote on ethical and critical perspectives on IP openness brought together fascinating IP perspectives. In the roundtable that IPACST hosted on “IP for a Sustainable Future”, representatives from the European Commission, patent offices, and sustainable businesses enriched the discussion with their views and insights on the role of IP for sustainability.

The conference put a spotlight on ongoing research on IP for sustainable development and offered a platform for academics, industry specialists, and policy-makers to discuss how to advance IP research towards tackling sustainability challenges such as climate crisis and inequality. The EPIP organizers and the IPACST team thank all the sponsors, contributors and participants for making the conference a grand success.

The TAPESTRY project has been busy with a number of events in recent weeks

On 16 August a Batik-making workshop in Kultali, Sundarbans, brought together local people to make artwork. You can see some of the artworks here:

On 23 August TAPESTRY held a roundtable in Mumbai to discuss findings and next steps with community members and other local stakeholders, and in the same month Bombay61 and Mumbai’s Ministry of Magic held a four-day festival to celebrate local fishers’ relationships with the ecosystem, including an exhibition of co-produced images and maps, and local tours. Community validation workshops were held in the Indian and Bangladesh Sundarbans, as well as a stakeholder meeting at Caritas India, and a Roundtable at IUB in Dhaka.

On 8 and 9 September TAPESTRY held well-attended workshops and a roundtable in Kachchh, Gujarat, to share and discuss findings with teachers, local leaders and government officials. The events were well-attended and were covered in the local media, and photos from the research were also exhibited.

On 24 September a national roundtable took place, open to all, to discuss learning from all the TAPESTRY sites.

On 20 September 2022 the T2GS team in India organized a one-day dissemination workshop in Pune, India. About one hundred people took part in the workshop, including men and women farmers, water activists and academics.

The teams from SOPPECOM and ACWADAM shared the key findings of the study done in Ravangaon village, Maharashtra, India as part of the T2GS project.

The study in Ravangaon aimed to understand the challenges in governing groundwater with relation to irrigation by looking at the water management practices of farmers. The village has a number of water sources, including an irrigation tank from the 19th century, the main canal of a major irrigation project and a fifth-order stream which passes through the village. Yet over the last two decades, the village has seen a steep increase in the number of dug-wells and bore wells in the command areas of the canal and the tank.

The T2S project’s socio-hydrological analysis with a feminist lens helped unfold the complex story of the political economy of Ravangaon’s water and how it co-shapes the lives and livelihoods of the diverse socioeconomic groups that reside in the village.

While the experts commended the teams for doing a first-of-its-kind study by integrating the social and technical, the villagers reflected on their situation and – while agreeing with the analysis – discussed the challenges they faced to move towards ecologically sound practices in agriculture and water use.

The AGENTS project, in partnership with local non-governmental organization Sapopema, organized an audiovisual workshop for young people on the 3rd of August 2022 in Santarem, Brazil.

The workshop focused on building practical knowledge to capture and edit images with their phones. The goal was to train and empower young people to use audiovisual technologies in order to communicate the initiatives that are taking place in their communities.

During the workshop ten experimental videos were produced using techniques learned, and can be accessed here:

 

The AGENTS Project recently launched a series of films called ‘People who transform’, in which local people in the Amazon were invited to produce short movies using their mobile phone to briefly tell us their local initiatives by answering the following questions:

• what has been transformed?
• who is transforming?
• what are the outcomes?
• how they keep their transformative process going?

The goal was to give visibility to sustainable initiatives developed by local populations in the region from more recent to long-term initiatives. The series includes initiatives related to timber and non-timber management, fishing management, organic agriculture, agroforestry in small-farms and traditional communities, oil production in indigenous communities, art and craft by women’s organizations, social technology for irrigation, learning-practice for education and a social fund to collective projects.

A total of 17 movies were produced and can be accessed here.

The videos were launched at the final AGENTS project meeting, “Dialogues for Transformation: Visibility of Sustainable Initiatives in the Amazon”, which took place from 4-5 August, 2022 in Santarém, Brazil. The two-day event comprised of internal and public sessions. During the internal sessions, AGENTS team presented the research results to 25 invited participants (farmers, practitioners and activists), and carried out a collective reflection on the results and possible ways forward. During the public session, the AGENTS team presented the project to an audience of ca. 80 people from various sectors of civil society, followed by a round table with five farmers and social movement leaders on opportunities and challenges to promote sustainable initiatives in the region.

The Transformations to Sustainability programme’s Waterproofing Data project has been shortlisted for the 2022 THE Awards ‘Project of the Year’ in the category of ‘Research Project of the Year: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences’ for its work on flood memories in Brazil.

The Waterproofing Data project investigated how to build communities’ resilience to flooding, by engaging stakeholders in the process of generating the data used to predict when floods will occur.

The research was carried out by an international, transdisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners from Brazil, Germany and the UK. They developed innovative methods and co-produced a social data-driven innovation combining community data and analytics to improve the resilience of communities to flooding.This included a citizen-science mobile app, ‘Dados à Prova D’Água‘, a model curriculum for schools, and a data analytics platform for developing early-warning models.

The project addressed the major adaptation and data gaps that exist around the world about the local impacts of climate hazards in vulnerable communities. It has been co-produced and successfully trialled with 300+ school students and civil protection agents in Brazil, and will be scaled up to engage citizens from vulnerable communities in Brazil and around the globe in transformative adaptation.

The winners of the awards will be announced in November 2022.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has issued a call for nominations of experts to participate in the methodological assessment of the impact and dependence of business on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people.

This assessment is aimed at categorizing how businesses depend on, and impact, biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people and at identifying criteria and indicators for measuring that dependence and impact, taking into consideration how such metrics can be integrated into other aspects of sustainability.

Read the full call and find out more about the nomination process here.

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Photo by Vlad Hilitanu on Unsplash.

The International Science Council (ISC), on behalf of the Belmont Forum and the NORFACE network, is seeking an expert science communication consultant to develop impact stories from twelve projects funded through the Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) programme.

The Belmont Forum and NORFACE research programme Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) supports and advances international, transdisciplinary research on the social dimensions of sustainability challenges and solutions. The programme funds twelve international research projects that are studying the challenges of transformations to sustainability in widely different socio-environmental domains and contexts around the globe. They are running from 2018 to 2022 with a combined research budget of 11.5m EUR. The activities and outputs of the projects are showcased on a dedicated website: t2sresearch.org. The ISC supports knowledge exchange and communications activities for the programme.

As the projects approach the end of their lifespans, the ISC is seeking a consultant (or team of consultants to be constituted by the applicant) to document and communicate the major societal outcomes of the research projects for non-expert audiences, notably research funders, policy makers and civil society organizations. The goal of these impact stories is to show the value of social science and transdisciplinary[1] research approaches in understanding and promoting transformative[2] pathways to sustainability. They should demonstrate that a social framing and transdisciplinary research on sustainability are critical and can have a significant impact on our lives and on the world.

The stories should use a narrative style to capture and convey the societal transformations towards sustainability that the projects have been studying and influencing in specific places and contexts. These transformations may be occurring at different levels (e.g. in community practices, sectors of society or the economy, policy making, perceptions, attitudes or behaviours, or ways of doing research). The stories should not attempt to summarize all the achievements or results of a project, but should rather focus on powerful examples of change or findings that have significant potential to underpin transformation. The stories should feature the voices of stakeholders involved in the research projects. They should pay attention to geographical, regional and gender balance among the voices represented and ensure that voices and perspectives from the Global South are included.

The consultant will need to:

1. Identify, in consultation with the ISC programme manager and project coordinators, project members and participants to interview,
2. schedule and conduct interviews with project members and participants,
3. propose a methodology to review the draft impact stories,
4. identify the transformations or changes the projects have studied and influenced, and the clearest examples of the impact of the projects on the ground,
5. draft compelling impact stories on the basis of these interviews and other background information about the projects,
6. identify suitable visual imagery that can be used alongside the impact stories,
7. respond to comments from reviewers and update the texts on the basis of these reviews,
8. work with the ISC Secretariat to finalize the impact stories into an appropriate publishable form.

The expected final deliverable for this project is a set of twelve impact stories (one per project) of around 1000–1500 words that showcase real-world outcomes of the project (the stories could include audio or video elements if available, but it is not anticipated that the consultant will develop new audio or video for the stories). Each story should include a perspective from at least one non-academic participant in the project, and should be accompanied by at least one high-quality image related to the story, which may be sourced directly from the projects themselves or from an online search.

The consultant(s) must have demonstrated experience in developing English-language stories of this type from social science research. The consultant(s) should have knowledge of the landscape of (transdisciplinary) social science research on environmental change and transformations to sustainability, as well as demonstrated experience in research/development communications. Experience of international, North–South scientific collaboration is desirable.

Here are some examples of dynamic stories which reflect the expected results from the work:

1. https://stories.council.science/unlocking-science-empowering-marginalised-communities/
2. https://stories.council.science/unlocking-science-new-drugs-malaria/

Key dates:

The timeframe for this project is approximately three months, with all stories to have been completed by 31 December 2022.

2 August – launch of request for expressions of interest
22 August – deadline for proposals
By 5 September – selection of consultant and agreement on terms
By 12 September – launch of project
31 December – deadline for completion of all impact stories

Budget

The indicative budget available for this project is of the order of 15,000–20,000 EUR (VAT included).

How to submit a proposal:

If you meet the criteria outlined above, please submit a proposal of maximum five pages to Sarah Moore (sarah.moore@council.science), including:

• A brief statement of the consultant’s understanding of the scope of services and proposed process of development for this project
• A brief description of the experience of the consultant that illustrates relevant qualifications and skills
• Examples of similar projects developed for past or current clients, with examples of or links to published information
• A budget breakdown

Proposals should be sent via email by 22 August 2022. Please include the subject line: ‘Call for expressions of interest: T2S impact stories’.

Questions about this request for proposals should be addressed to both Sarah Moore (sarah.moore@council.science) and Lizzie Sayer (lizzie.sayer@council.science).

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[1] The ISC understands ‘transdisciplinary approaches’ to mean research undertaken in close cooperation with stakeholders concerned, from the framing of the research questions to the generation of knowledge.

[2] The ISC understands transformation to be a profound and complex socio-ecological process with both short- and long-term implications for the sustainability of natural and social systems.

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Photo by Håkon Grimstad on Unsplash.