Projects in Development
A Sustainability Challenge: Food Security for All
The National Academies' Roundtable on Science and Technology for Sustainability will convene two public workshops in 2010 to help establish the dimensions of the sustainability challenge and explore the risks and opportunities that will be involved if the world is to achieve sustainable global food security by 2050. A first workshop, Measuring Food Insecurity and Assessing the Sustainability of Global Food Systems, will examine the empirical basis for past trends, the current situation and projections for the future. A second workshop will discuss interactions between food security and natural resource management/climate change. Funding is currently being sought for this project.
Trends, Challenges, and Pathways to Urban Sustainability
The National Academies will organize an international symposium in summer 2010 on the challenges and opportunities of finding ways to meet the needs of an increasingly urbanized world while sustaining critical resources and natural systems for future generations. The symposium will bring together city managers and planners, urban researchers from government and academia, and leaders from the donor and finance communities. Participants will share lessons learned and discuss how to mobilize their collective knowledge on what works and why, so that this century's urban areas will become substantially more sustainable than existing cities are today, and so that urban impacts on global sustainability are recognized and minimized. This symposium will also attempt to build on existing initiatives, with an eye towards connecting and learning from these isolated activities, and catalyzing additional resources and partners to engage in this critically important issue. Cities are complex systems, and fostering sustainable urban areas requires an integrated, cross-sectoral, and multi-disciplinary approach; the proposed effort would be a promising first step along that path. Funding is currently being sought for this project.
