Terry Mc Gee from The Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia

Download reports:

Report of the AGS Annual Meeting 2009:
Urban Futures: the Challenge of Sustainability

Report of the 1^st International Workshop on Sustainable City Region, Bali, February 2009:
International Workshop on Sustainable City Regions 2009

Report of the AGS at ETH Urban Futures seminar, November 2008:
Understanding the Dimensions of Urban Futures Research – tackling complex reality

The main themes:

• Mitigation and adaptation strategy to climate change and demographic change
• Sustainable city-regions
• Energy pathways to the future: smart grid and smart infrastructure
• Information exchange and communication between academia and society

More information on registration and submission of poster abstracts at  http://www.ags2010.org/

Download the AGS AM 2010 flyer

To achieve sustainability, societies will have to change dramatically in the coming decades. The transition will require adaptation at all levels – new international agreements and regulatory frameworks, new technologies and business models, new infrastructures, altered value systems and patterns of consumption. This transition must happen in a rapidly changing world -  in a rapidly aging and urbanizing population in both developed and developing countries.

The choice of Tokyo for the 2010 AGS annual meeting is appropriate: the Tokyo metropolitan area houses 34 million; in 2050 one third of them will be over 65. The University of Tokyo is a key research institution in the East Asian region. East Asia is being affected by an aging population and the rapid pace of urbanization now.

Universities are sources of future solutions and innovations to tackle complex problems. The amount of knowledge is increasing exponentially. How can academia exchange knowledge for sustainability with society to achieve effective change?

The AGS Annual Meeting 2010 will offer keynote talks by leading thinkers on these issues, in-depth workshops on energy pathways, future city regions, technology innovation and transfer for the low carbon society, and urban futures for an age of extended life.

Link to ClimateSciNet: www.climatescinet.com

More information about the meeting: UT-SC workshop at  AGSAM2010

“Management of Health Risk from Environment and Food”, edited by Hajime Sato, describes a five-country comparison of the policy and politics of health risk management with a focus on asbestos and BSE.
More info: AGS book series volume 16

“Highway and Urban Environment – Proceedings of the 9th Highway and Urban Environment Symposium”. Editor Sébastien Rauch, Greg Morrison and André Monzón.
More info: AGS book series volume 17

AGS faculty are invited to publish resarch in the AGS book series, more information is available in the book series section

Discount offer is available on all Springer books for faculty at AGS Universities. Please contact Alexandra Priatna to get the discount token.

The AGS book series ‘Science and Technology: tools for sustainable development’ published by Springer, provides timely accounts based on AGS research into emerging barriers to sustainable development, and methodologies  and tools to help governments, industry and civil society overcome them. The level of presentation is for graduate students in natural, social and engineering sciences as well as policy and decision makers in government, industry and civil society.

The Sloan School of Management at MIT offers a course that specifically addresses how organizations of all kinds – including traditional manufacturing firms, those that extract resources, a huge variety of new start-ups, non-profits, and governmental organizations of all types – are tackling the massive challenges of sustainability. The course includes the S-Lab, where teams of students focus on “live” projects with an organization that has requested help in thinking through a challenge or opportunity related to sustainability. The goal of S-Lab is to provide students with an opportunity to apply the concepts, theories and tools through working with host organizations on their actual sustainability projects. Each team professionally and effectively delivers analysis, advice and recommendations that are immediately useful to the host organization and advance the field of sustainability as a whole. The teams make a formal presentation to the host organization at the end of the project and provide them with a final report, including supporting written analysis and data as appropriate, and present a project poster for the MIT and wider community.

Students at S-La

The host organizations often incorporate the S-Lab team results into their policies and procedures, reflecting the real-time value of the topic for their organization. Host organizations have also followed up on the S-Lab results through additional collaboration with MIT faculty and staff, including subsequent course-based projects, internships, and research programs.

More about S-Lab.

The bulk of the work involved producing half page summaries on topics such as smart grids, prospects for CCS, carbon prices, eco cities and food and water challenges. From Chalmers, this was done by Profs Morisson, Malbert, Johnsson and Wirsenius, and by PhD Student Eoin Ó Broin. ETH, MIT and University of Tokyo faculty and experts are also contributing, as well as an MIT S-Lab student group.

In addition Steve Connors, AGS Energy Pathways coordinator, participated in a Vision 2050 workshop in Zurich in June and gave invaluable input there and to the work that followed.

by Eoin Ó Broin, PhD student at Energy Conversion, Chalmers.