Webinar SwitchAsia: Consumption and Resilience at HEIs
Switch Asia organised a webinar titled "Consumption and Resilience: The role of Institutes of Higher Education" on 27th October 2022.
About
Institutes of higher education (IHEs) are well positioned to coordinate efforts to build local resilience across the economic and civil sectors and reduce the harmful impacts of disasters and crises on lives and livelihoods. Their ability to experiment, move quickly, mobilise a wide range of stakeholders and capital through their networks of collaborators, and strategically support risk-taking makes them unique actors in the SCP ecosystem. In these ways, IHEs can contribute significantly to local, national, and global actions to ensure that current recovery efforts result in substantive progress toward SCP and local resilience. Indeed, they can be key players in achieving models of sustainable resilience that align with the central objective of the Sustainable Development Goals to “leave no one behind”. This approach places emphasis on eradicating poverty, ending exclusion and discrimination, and reducing the vulnerabilities and inequalities that undermine human flourishing and capabilities. With these factors in mind, there is a need to convene experts and sustainability practitioners from governments, businesses, educational institutions, and civil society to discuss the opportunity space presented by the post-pandemic recovery to build sustainable local resilience. This discussion must consider how universities can serve as experimental spaces or work with communities to create living laboratories where stakeholders can come together to solve these challenges and ensure that the costs and benefits of the recovery process and emerging post-pandemic ‘next normal’ are equitably shared across stakeholder groups.
Dr. Roger Petry, Professor of Philosophy at Luther College at the University of Regina in the Department of Philosophy and Classics, and co-lead for SDG 12 in the IAU HESD Cluster, was one of the invited speakers.