At the end of October, TIAS held its Annual General Meeting. One important agenda item was the election of a new president,  treasurer and member of the Advisory Board. On behalf of the association, we are happy to welcome Caroline van Bers to the executive board in her new role as president, replacing Klaus Jacob who has been at our helm for six years. We also extend a warm welcome to our newest members, Christelle Rocoffort de Vinnière, who takes on the role of honorary treasurer and Pedro Jacobi who lends his extensive experience and a Latin American perspective to our Advisory Board.
 
Caroline van Bers needs no introduction to TIAS members. She has been with TIAS since 2004 initially as secretary and, until recently, the treasurer. She is editor of the newsletter and oversees the website, organises many of the association’s webinars and other communication activities. Caroline is a research associate with the Institute of Environmental Systems Research at Osnabrueck University. She joins Jan Bakkes and Marcela Brugnach in the executive board.
 
We wish to express our sincere gratitude to Klaus Jacob, as outgoing president, for his leadership and commitment and for steering a steady course for TIAS over the last six years. He guided TIAS in, among other activities, the implementation of a new working group on IA  principles, the launch of the Learning Community, the establishment of the regional group, TIAS-Latin America, overseeing an ongoing and successful webinar series and expanding our network. We wish him continued success in his future endeavours as Research Director of the Environmental Policy Research Centre at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Christelle Rocoffort de Vinnière joins us as the new treasurer of TIAS. She is working in corporate social responsibility at the ALDI SOUTH Group in Austria. Her work involves addressing social and environmental topics in high-risk food supply chains as well as conducting human rights impact assessments. She has a background in social anthropology from the London School of Economics and a masters in environmental science, policy and management from the Central European University, now based in Vienna, Austria.
 

Pedro Jacobi of the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of São Paulo was introduced to the Advisory Board in May 2021 and his role as a member of the board was formalised at the AGM in October.  Professor Jacobi’s research focuses on water governance, urban environmental governance and social participation, social learning and education for sustainability, and cities and climate change.


 

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Letter from the president: Catalysts for Sustainability


Dear members of TIAS,

In December 2016, Klaus Jacob, former president of TIAS published a letter to members in this newsletter entitled, Turbulent times for Sustainability, referring to the prevalent trends: nationalism, protectionism, climate change denial, and the increasing division of many societies along ethnic and cultural lines, that are undermining the basic principles of sustainable development. He ended by expressing his confidence in the catalysts that will bring about greater progress towards sustainability.

And indeed the past five years have seen the emergence or strengthening of catalysts that are spurring, and in many cases forcing, wide-spread transformation mostly in response to new and unexpected signals. Among the most notable of these catalysts is world-wide activism sparked by the young heirs of our collective legacy together with the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme climate events, that have finally broken the inertia slowing down climate action as well as the restoration of land and biodiversity. Backed by the strong evidence base built up over decades we are now witnessing a race among governments and industry to become carbon-neutral. The pandemic with its associated lockdowns and global trade disruptions has also triggered new initiatives to reform urban life in particular and shift to circular economies.  

However, catalysts are still lacking in many other areas. Sustainable development urgently demands widespread planning and implementation of safe and legal routes for migrants and refugees and their eventual settlement in other regions and countries. The list of priorites, especially in the global south, is long, and the SDGs serve as a beacon for what has to be achieved.

For the IA community, the pandemic together with the changing climate have also demonstrated that in a post-truth era, the challenge to science of providing credible inputs to evidence-based interventions in practice and policy remains. This needs to tackled by practioners and scholars themselves and then in open dialogue with government, business and civil society. How this can potentially be addressed will be the subject of a TIAS webcast in 2022 and eventually, we hope, a workshop.

The IA community is diverse in the scope of socio-environmental challenges it addresses. There are so many areas in which it can and has been helping to catalyze positive transformational changes. A few examples:

• Providing guidance on strategies for contributing to the SDGs and raise awareness of them by integrating them into our research and education programmes, and promoting their mainstreaming into national, regional and especially local plans and policies;
• Providing education which is problem-oriented and project-oriented merging disciplines and approaches to assess problems and develop solutions, and at the same time promoting the development of leadership skills and autonomous thinking among students and early career researchers;
• Building innovation components into our research projects to attract entrepreneuers and make them active partners in these solution-oriented projects, and thus also contributing to new employment opportunities. 

Looking through the TIAS portfolio of activities in 2021, the society has contributed to the summer school on ‘Analysing Transformative Processes for the Management of the WEF nexus and the Advancement of the SDGs in Sub-Saharan Africa’ attended online by 40 students and early career researchers and practitioners mainly from subsaharan Africa (led by Osnabrueck University together with three South African universities). The Learning Community held a webcast on ‘Narratives for engagement, learning and action-taking in support of environmental management‘ which explored ways of integrating narrative and learning theories and approaches in environmental management. The Grand Challenges in Socio-Environmental Systems Modeling series of webcasts (described below) cohosted by SESYNC, SESMO and TIAS highlighted the current challenges and ways forward for practitioners and scholars who commission, sponsor, or use SES models for addressing problems and developing solutions at the human-nature interface. TIAS was also one of the coordinating partners in the now completed Dutch-German MEDUWA Project which, through the involvement of 27 partners including 16 SMEs, developed solutions (13 innovations) to pharmaceuticals and antiobiotic resistence in the environment.

The IA community has a considerable track record in contributing directly or indirectly to the solutions towards restoring and protecting both natural and social capital. More than ever before, the community of IA practitioners and researchers need to strengthen collaboration among multiple disciplines and segments of society from government, business, civil society to address these complex global phenomena. The role of this community in strengthening and sharing approaches and tools that facilitate this has never been so clear, from faciliating public-private-civic partnerships, to bringing together north-south perspectives in coping with change. Efforts to actively engage younger generations in the development of solutions needs to remain high on the IA agenda too.

TIAS is on this path. Let us continue to reflect on our agenda in this era of rapid change on how to effectively contribute at all levels from education to the policy.

On behalf of TIAS we wish you a healthy, happy and successful 2022!

Caroline van Bers
 

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Webcast Series on Grand Challenges of SES Modelling continues

The joint webcast series by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), the journal, Socio-Environmental Systems Modeling and TIAS on expanding the development and use of socio-environmental system (SES) models continues

A webcast on June 28 (29 in eastern Asia, AU, NZ) explored issues of scale in SES Modeling based on the 2021 article “Socio-technical scales in socio-environmental modeling: Managing a system-of-systems modeling approach.” It was led by co-author, Hsiao-Hsuan Wang,  Senior Research Scientist, Ecological Systems Laboratory, Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology, Texas A&M University, and followed by insightful comments from three panelists, Val Snow, Agroecosystem Modeler and Senior Scientist, AgResearch Ltd., New Zealand, Derek T. Robinson, Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo, Canada, and Volker Grimm, Researcher, Department of Ecological Modelling, Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig and Professor at the University of Potsdam, Germany. The webinar recording is now available for viewing.

              

A subsequent webcast on Creating Socio-Environmental Scenarios took place on October 20th and explored the present status and futures of creating socio-environmental scenarios. Presentations were provided by Vanessa Schweizer, Associate Professor, University of Waterloo and Director, Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation, Canada and Hannah Kosow, Research Associate, Center for Interdisciplinary Risk and Innovation Studies, University of Stuttgart, Germany.This was followed by a panel session with responses from Sondoss El Sawah, Associate Professor, University of New South Wales, Australia,  Martin Cenek, Associate Professor, University of Portland, USA, and Rebecca Kariuki, Carson Fellow, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Germany and African Institute of Mathematical Sciences Fellow in Climate Change Science, Rwanda. The two presentations can be viewed on the SESYNC site. See also the SESYNC tutorial on creating Socioenvironmental Scenarios.

The organisers are discussing themes for 2022 webcasts.

Modelling for Policy Support:
Reflections on the EU’s recent conference

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