Doctoral student workshop

Interconnected Disaster Risks is an annual science-based report from United Nations University – Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS). It takes a closer look at disasters happening around the world, their interconnections with each other and with human activities, and highlights solutions.

The presentation will focus on the findings of the 2023 edition, which focuses on tipping points, specific thresholds after which unstoppable changes occur that can have irreversible, catastrophic impacts for people and the planet. The analysis goes beyond just physical tipping points and illustrates that many new risks emerge when our physical and natural worlds interconnect with human society. The report analysis six specific tipping points ahead of us that could trigger abrupt changes in our life-sustaining systems and shake the foundations of our societies. It explains the potential consequences for people and planet and assesses options to avoid or mitigate them.

The concept of sustainability has been built around the foundational pillars of economy, society, and the environment; and, more often, in relation to human agential. Recently, the concept and its pillars have also been extended to non-human agential such as Artificial Intelligence and Robotic technologies. However, on their own, these pillars provide foundations but not decisive in serving as standards for sustaining both human and non-human agential with emerging imaginaries and threats, and a number of strands reshaping existence and each strand demanding for recognition. Therefore, we ask: should the pillars of sustainability be expanded to include other factual possibilities? Should we find a converging standard in rethinking sustainability? This paper infers that sustainability as the ability for a thing to stay at certain degree presupposes that (i) a good is to be maintained, (ii) the good can either be singular or collective (and, sometimes, multiples), and (iii) the good or goods (in case of multiples) must be reconcilable. Examining the presuppositions, however, I realised that to achieve sustainability, it is necessary to fulfil a demand for recognition of a good based on the very grounds on which recognition of that good has previously been denied: qua human or qua non-human. The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of ‘universal recognition’ based on shared human attributes (e.g., intelligence, consciousness, reciprocity, etc.,); nor is it for respect ‘in spite of’ differences. Rather, what is demanded is respect for an agential to be recognised as different but part of a whole premised on the idea of ‘distinction without difference’. To do this, I will use an approach, termed as “Comitative Asymmetry” modelled on the terms, ‘comity’ and ‘asymmetry’ and inspired by the Ewe word, srɔ̃ɖeɖe (learning together) in a metaphorical sense. To this end, the difficulties in attaining sustainability can be reduced when attention is paid to a good, perceived or real, of diverse agential (multi-agents) and in cases when the goods are incommensurable. I will argue that comitative asymmetry is necessary for the integration of the “otherness” (with their good), particularly, the non-human agential. Properly considered, it can be implored as criterion of precondition and postcondition of sustainability and has a potential to affect policy domains (and may have broader consequences for society at large).

Keywords: Sustainability, agential, human, non-human, comity, asymmetry, good, artificial intelligence, Ewe

Vanessa Amatotsero¹, Javier Miranda¹, Jan Börner^{1, 2}
1 Institute of Food and Resource Economics, University of Bonn
2 Center for Development Research, University of Bonn

Rural livelihood strategies are highly context-dependent. This makes cause-effect relationships between poverty and natural resources, such as forests, chronically hard to establish empirically. Key contextual determinants of the relationship between poverty and the environment are known to include biogeophysical and socio-economic factors, but crucially also cultural and historical trajectories. One way to infer the role of these factors in shaping interactions between rural poverty and forests is to study the dynamics of these outcomes under different policy regimes while holding other factors constant. Here we have to explore a unique historical policy experiment that is likely to have had a lasting effect on rural poverty in Namibia. Long before Namibian independence, ruling authorities had divided the Namibian territory into two zones that allowed for different types and modes of agricultural activity. The location of the line that separated the two zones was changed several times due to political and veterinary reasons. We use the historical spatiotemporal variation in this agricultural zoning policy in a spatial regression-discontinuity design to explore heterogeneous impacts on rural welfare. Preliminary results suggest that changes in the red line policy are likely to have partially contributed to substantial differences in today's rural wealth distributions which may have implications for the integrity of dry forests in the region. We discuss research needs and policy implications with a particular emphasis on the role of agency and power as determinants of rural poverty via land as well as market access and distribution mechanisms.

Localizing the sustainable development goals is a universal task for all including the business society.  Particularly, corporate sustainability management within extractive companies operating across West Africa is key to enhance rural in the region owing to the dynamic relationship between extractive companies and their surrounding socioecological systems. As a modified version of rural development, rural resilience encompasses improving the economic, cultural, social and ecological wellbeing of rural dwellers who are known to be custodians of natural heritages. Since, formal conservation practices such as the Park systems have not achieved full nature conservation objectives and are being replaced by community-based natural resources management. Supporting community-based and cultural practices whereby rural dwellers draw on their cultural affinity with nature is key to enhancing nature conservation. Mining landscapes within the West African Craton are overlaid with a number of biodiversity priority areas, which are of global significance.  Moreover, the increased trend in climatic variability across the region poses diverse risk on sustainable mining and presents a double burden of extractivism and climate change impacts on the socio-ecological systems surrounding these multinational extractive companies (mining, plantations, timber and petroleum). Thus, enhancing resilience within rural mining landscapes are imperative.

Through the lens of industrial ecology, the mining industry is typified to operate as an eco-sociotechnical system within the rural regions of West Africa. The dynamic interactions among the system components generates outcomes, which determines the overall performances of the industry but most especially, resilience of the surrounding socio-ecological systems. For instance, given that, the West African region is a hotspot for climate change and vulnerability, rural communities and their dependent ecosystem services risk the double exposure of mining and climate change impacts. Being part of the mining system, the double exposed subsystems will self-organize and generate emergent properties, which will affect industries’ sustainability, which is equally susceptible to the local effects of changing climate.  Hence, measures to drive sustainable mining such as corporate climate adaptation must not be perceived as an operational level risk to be managed, but be targeted as corporate social responsibility, a dimension of corporate sustainability. A case study in Ghana confirms the double burden of local effects of changing climate and extractivism on rural livelihood systems as well as the high expectations for extractive companies to contribute toward addressing declining ecosystem services by enhancing rural resilience.  

Thus, the mining industry must move its gauge from corporate responsibility that focuses on addressing industries’ socio-environmental impacts toward corporate sustainability, which is characterized by creating shared value for all stakeholders. By doing so, climate change adaptation in mining can be operationalized as a corporate social responsibility strategy and be realistically achieved through collaborative efforts of all stakeholders including local government, State-appointed regulators, governing bodies of the industry and perhaps via legal instruments

Under the supervision of the clinical director Prof. Dr. Coburn my research is focused on the transformation of the health care sector in particular the anesthesiology towards sustainable work processes.

The transformation of the health care sector towards sustainability is in many ways essential. At first, missing the targets of the Paris Agreement which is an international treaty on climate change will have various consequences. Thus, the anthropogenic climate change will not only affect global ecosystems and socioeconomic factors, but also impacts negatively global health in a variety of ways. Therefore, the climate crisis will be on of the biggest health care challenges in the 21st century. Medical professionals play a pivotal role. On the one hand, health care workers are committed, in accordance with the principle of the Hippocratic oath "primum non nocere", to restore and maintain the health of their patients. On the other hand, the healthcare sector exacerbates the climate crisis as one of the largest global emitters of greenhouse gases (5.2% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2019). A significant proportion of these CO2 emissions is attributable to anesthesiology and intensive care medicine as a highly technical and resource-intensive sector of the health care system. Additionally,the patient care is a highly resource-intensive sector. Further, the health care sector is bearing a considerable share of the world-wide plastic pollution and requires a significant portion of metals for the production of technical instruments. Usually, these medical products are single-use equipment. To my opinion, the medical profession plays a considerable role in the combat against climate change.

In recent years, many discussions have arisen how to address sustainability issues in the health care sector. One of the biggest challenges is to combine the needs of nature’s health with the needs of people’s health. To my opinion the transformation of the health care sector towards more sustainable processes is vital. My research work concentrates on the 5-R of sustainability which represents the terms reuse, refuse, recycle, reduce and rethink. My first research project is the reduction of inhalation anesthetics which are highly potent greenhouse gases. In the last years we achieved a reduction of several tons per year due to the change to less harmful inhalation anesthetics and to more ecological anesthesia techniques. In the following months we will start a multicenter study with the university hospital of Aachen to evaluate the current application of inhalational anesthetics. Based on these data we will develop computer-controlled algorithms in cooperation with medical companies to establish aecological use of inhalational anesthetics. The second research topic deals with the establishment of internal waste management systems. This system should lead to a circular economy of medical waste. Therefore, we are going to develop teaching units for medical students as well as the nurse trainees which will be accompanied by trainings for doctors and nurses.

Livable cities are often described as vibrant, diverse and accessible. However, in reality socio-spatial segregation, unequal power constellations and exclusion of vulnerable groups like urban poor or informal dwellers are rather hindering the consideration of different points of view. This is particularly the case for cities in Global South Countries who face a huge need to develop solutions for dealing with climate change and growing impacts from disasters in a socially just way.

The presentation will focus on learnings from the Transformative Urban Coalitions project that UNU is leading. The project facilitates the establishment of urban labs in five Latin American cities to co-develop new strategies for making them more sustainable. It thereby merges research with action and transformative communication to achieve the coupled goals of climate action and social justice.

Authors Karen van de Locht¹, Ines Perrar¹, Ute Alexy¹, Ute Nöthlings¹
1 Institute of Nutrition and Food Sciences, Nutritional Epidemiology, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.

Objective Environmental impact of human diets is highly relevant for planetary health. As a relevant age group for establishing nutritional behavior and as the future generation children and adolescents are of great research interest in this debate. Therefore, our aim was to analyze age and time trends of Greenhouse Gas Emission (GHGE), Land Use (LU), and Water use (WU) of diets in children and adolescents in Germany, and additionally investigate the associations between nutrient adequacy and dietary GHGE, LU and WU.

Methods A total of 5,510 3-day-weighted dietary records, conducted between 2000 and 2021 by 856 participants (6-17y) of the dynamic DONALD (DOrtmund Nutritional and Anthropometric Longitudinally Designed) study were analyzed. All reported food items were linked to the databases, namely SHARP, Optimeal, and from Poore et al., which contained GHGE (kgCO²eq), LU (m² x year), and WU (l) per kg of each food item determined by life-cycle analysis. Multivariable polynomial mixed-effects regression models were used to (1) identify time and age trends of GHGE, LU, and WU per 1000 kcal and (2) to examine associations of these environmental sustainability indicators with nutrient adequacy according to German reference values (Mean Adequacy Ratio (MAR)).

Results GHGE/1000kcal, LU/1000kcal, and WU/1000kcal increased with age (p≤0.0016). Regarding time trends, GHGE/1000kcal and LU/1000kcal slightly increased between 2000 and 2010 and slightly decreased thereafter among girls (p≤0.0028). A similar time trend in GHGE/1000kcal was shown for boys (p≤0.0232). No significant time trend was found for LU/1000kcal among boys and for WU/1000kcal among both sexes (p>0.05). A higher MAR was associated with slightly higher GHGE/1000kcal (MAR: ß=0.011, 95%CI: 0.008-0.013, p<0.0001), slightly higher LU/1000kcal (MAR: 0.009, 0.005-0.013, p<0.0001) and higher WU/1000kcal (MAR: 0.429, 0.325-0.533, p<0.0001).

Conclusion Adolescents’ dietary practices appear to be less favorable than those of younger children in regard to GHGE, LU, and WU. Adolescents should therefore be a particular focus of interventions toward more environmentally sustainable diets. The only small decrease in dietary GHGE and LU in recent years, and mostly only among girls, underscores the need for systemic changes. Nutrient adequacy, especially for children and adolescents, must be ensured when identifying more environmentally sustainable diets.

Technology is commonly heralded as one, if not the solution to climate and sustainability worries. High hopes are put, for example, into electric or hydrogen vehicles to revolutionise the automobile industry. Technology producers and companies are keen on fostering this image. Big Tech initiatives like Microsoft’s AI for Good vow to direct their data science technologies towards “solving the world’s greatest challenges”. The technical imperative of efficiency promises to streamline production processes and minimise harmful emissions. Likewise, the notion of technical innovation invokes utopian visions of both technological and social progress towards a better, greener future.

In light of the undeniable ecological and social benefits that clever technological solutions may bring, it is too often forgotten (or deliberately concealed) that technology is the means to humankind’s dominion over planet and people in the first place. Our unsustainable lifestyles are inherently technologically mediated and upheld. It is high time to turn our regard to the sustainability of technology itself.

In order to make sustainability effects of technology visible, technological artefacts must be considered in their embeddedness and interaction with natural, technical, and social systems, i.e. in their socio-environmental-technical context, and along their entire life cycle.

I take Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies as an illustrative example. AI is often considered in isolation — as this or that particular algorithm — and is also commonly regulated as such, detached from its material instantiation and its production, maintenance and obsolescence history. Only very recently has attention been shifted to potential sustainability impacts of AI technologies. Their large-scale socio-economic context includes mining operations for rare minerals, global manufacturing and shipping of computing components, the operation of large data centers, globally dispersed and precarious clickwork, e-waste management, and much more. AI, as any technology, is both constituted by and in turn changes environmental, social, and economic systems and cycles.

This large-scale impact can only be addressed if technologies are consistently conceptualised as embedded in all of these interconnected systems and cycles. In the philosophy of technology, scholars of the predominant Empirical Turn have long retired any attempt at analysing Technology (with a capital “T”) and put emphasis on particular technologies. While particular issues of particular technologies certainly get lost in musings about the nature of technology tout court, a sole focus on particularities loses sight of big-picture-considerations. These are essential to addressing sustainability. From a sustainability perspective, a new philosophy of technology is needed.

Presently in the fourth industrial revolution of electronics and digitalisation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fast becoming the driving force in almost all spheres of life in global communities. AI products are becoming as ubiquitous as smart digital devices and the internet, bringing about so much change to our lives. From improving health care, agriculture, finance, social life, education, manufacturing, political administration, legal service, just to mention a few, AI promises to transform the world. 

Yet, AI’s power for positive change is equally matched by negative implications for the global society we live in, particularly for those societies that are underdeveloped so most vulnerable to economic, environmental, and social impacts. Precisely, natural resources are used to build, power and maintain the physical edifice on which AI operates. Therefore, explosive demand for AI products equally increases the demand and supply of natural resources. However, attention is not paid to the environmental and social hidden costs of this technology. The extraction of minerals – a heavy majority of which is sourced from Africa – when done irresponsibly, leaves the continent the most impacted by the environmental effects of AI. This phenomenon is exacerbated by the global shift from fossil fuel to green renewable and sustainable energy as critical minerals from Africa are integral to the success of this mission. What is more, the global generation of electrical and electronic waste (e-waste) that attend the age of digitalisation tremendously impacts the environment and health of surrounding populations (especially women) of non-Western and non-European spaces that have become dump sites of e-waste, particularly Africa.

In view of these dangers, now is the time to call for diversity in AI ethics debate not only to properly frame the problem but also to suggest ways to mitigate the problem. Pointedly, now is the time for a diverse range of philosophical and ethical traditions that are neither Eurocentric nor Western. It is the time to include and engage (feminist) African philosophy and ethics in global discourse on AI ethics. On the global scale, now is the time for all stakeholders – designers, developers, consumers, citizens, policy makers, civil societies, and states to be intentional about awareness of the hidden costs of AI products, and to responsibly redefine and engage their wants and needs.