Over the last decades, the rapid effects of global change, mostly related to population growth, hectic production systems, and environmental and climate variations, have shown the paramount importance of environmental sustainability for the livelihoods of Earth population and should be managed as a cross-cutting priority. Particular attention should be paid to low-income contexts, where a variety of imbalance and vulnerability factors might threaten or irreversibly affect the integrity of the last remaining near-natural ecosystems.
In this framework, the UNESCO Chair in Engineering for Human and Sustainable Development launches the fourth edition of ESIC’s, a cycle of Environmental Sustainability and International Cooperation webinars aimed at exploring, together with actors of international cooperation and researchers, key environmental challenges of international interest and possible ways forward, drawing from the state of science and from the experience of local contexts. In each webinar, a specific topic will be interactively discussed. In this fifth edition, we will tackle nature-based solutions for sustainable cities, combating pollution in agriculture, water and sanitation and water quality assessment, earth observation from space, among others, with international speakers from academia and cooperation agencies.
To effectively deal with climate change and the environmental crisis, ESIC’s places a high value on training a new generation of environmental engineers to cope with complex technical and non-technical problems and to provide innovative and sustainable solutions in the context of international cooperation, with a project-oriented and hands-on approach, fostering transdisciplinary knowledge, cutting-edge research and excellence in teaching.