Universities from around the world are moving in the right direction in terms of meeting the challenges of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but there are still mountains to climb, participants at the first general conference of the International Association of Universities (IAU) held in six years heard. University World News was the media partner for the event. The conference, hosted by University College Dublin in Ireland from 25-28 October, was presented with preliminary findings from the Higher Education and Research for Sustainable Development (HESD 2022) survey on accelerating action on the SDGs. Climate course content Around 240 higher education institutions responded to all six climate change education questions, with about 70% reporting they offered a relatively small number of courses with some climate content, somewhere between 50 and 500 courses. A further 8% said they offered between 501 and 2,500 courses and 22% claimed to have more than 2,500 courses with climate content. However, 60% of respondents pointed out that climate-related content is found in less than 10% of all their courses. Private higher education institutions reported a wider array of departments and disciplines offering climate courses than public universities and the greatest concentration of institutions claiming to offer courses including climate content was found in Sub-Saharan Africa, with the figures varying from between 30% and 50% in responses across the region. As for research, about half of all institutions responding to the survey estimated annual faculty production of climate publications at 20 or fewer publications per year; 30% reported faculty production at between 21 and 100 publications; and 15% of institutions estimated their faculty produce more than 100 climate publications in a year. Isabel Toman, programme officer for sustainable development at the IAU, told University World News: “Higher education is being asked to be a key player in meeting all the SDGs and we are encouraged that the preliminary findings to our survey show that more institutions are rising to the challenges. The full results will be published at an online event on 31 January 2023.” Toman said the IAU received a total of 464 responses overall to its survey looking at how higher education institutions work with sustainable development and the SDGs across the board. Three partners were involved the survey: the Asia-Europe Foundation, Conferencia de Rectores de las Universidades Españolas (CRUE) and the Monitoring and Evaluating Climate Communication and Education (MECCE) Project, the latter looking specifically at climate change education. In the preliminary findings, institutional involvement in both SDG 4, which aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all, and SDG 13, which calls for urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts, was highest among universities in Europe and Northern America. Latin America and the Caribbean reported the second highest level of higher education involvement across both SDGs. Diego Posada, a researcher for the MECCE Project, told the conference the figures might seem low, especially for the percentage of courses offered with climate content, but a decade ago the figure would have been zero, or very low, at many institutions. “We’re definitely moving in the right direction,” he told University World News. Role of university leadership The IAU has established global clusters to lead work on each of the 17 UN SDGs and support the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with a university from around the world leading the first 16 and the IAU taking responsibility for SDG 17: Partnerships for the goals. During the Dublin conference session focusing on the role of university leadership, several speakers from universities steering the clusters addressed delegates. Pornchai Mongkhonvanit, president of Siam University in Thailand, which is leading the cluster supporting SDG 11 (Sustainable cities and communities), said it was part of a university’s role to make the world a better place for future generations and it was one of the reasons he joined the IAU. He said he was pleased to see around 80 members working on this initiative. Ibtihal Elgharabawi El-Bastawissi, dean of the faculty of architecture at Beirut Arab University, Lebanon, which is leading the industry, innovation and infrastructure cluster, said she was developing a two-year capacity building plan to support SDG 9, but some colleagues struggled to grasp the idea of a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach when building resilient infrastructure and promoting inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and fostering innovation. Sandra Guarín Tarquino, director of the international office at Antonio Nariño University, Colombia, which is coordinating the cluster on SDG 2 (Zero hunger), said it was important to connect all the different stakeholders inside a university to focus on sustainable development, including international students. Richard Grubb, head of policy and strategic partnerships at the Association of Commonwealth Universities, which represents just over 500 universities in all parts of the world, including small islands facing major resilience challenges, urged the IAU to involve international associations in “truly transformative partnerships”. He said universities should collaborate and form multi-stakeholder partnerships that go beyond vice-chancellors. Case study from Kenya In a discussion following the presentations, Vincent Ogutu, vice-chancellor of Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya, congratulated those focusing on best practice – but suggested also talking about “best problems to solve”. Initiatives that can make a real difference do not have to be on a grand scale, said Ogutu, who told University World News how Strathmore University was turning theories about sustainable development into practical support after being approached by KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, which offered to share its system called Challenge Directed Education. “One project involved a KTH professor coming to Kenya to train our lecturers in how our business students could support poorer members of the community in Nairobi,” said Ogutu. “We jumped at the offer and one of the first projects involved a woman vendor selling vegetables by the side of our main road near the campus … She wasn’t making much money. “After talking to her and studying her business model, the students and lecturer suggested she offer to take orders for vegetables and deliver them to all the neighbours living nearby. “The students prepared marketing materials and by the time the project finished, the vendor had quadrupled her turnover and had to employ several people to keep up with demand. “She is now making much more money and the students have learned how to run a real business.” Ogutu is also working with an old classmate he studied with for his PhD in the United States. “Professor Jessica Salmon, who is now at Siena College in upstate New York, got her students to come up with suggestions to problems that non-profits are grappling with in Africa, and we had African experts on the ground to give them feedback on how feasible their ideas were in an African context. “Together, we worked on causes like homelessness, unemployment and food insecurity and got some excellent ideas from them and have now had a paper accepted by an international journal, the Journal of Teaching in International Business. So what we have learned together is now going back into the academic pool. “This model could be a great way of using US students and African experts to solve real-life problems. It isn’t a ‘top down’ or ‘North-South’ approach of ‘we know best’ and could work in so many places around the world, and demonstrates how higher education can make a real impact on sustainable development by working with North-South partners on equal terms,” said Ogutu. SDG media hub Brendan O’Malley, editor in chief of University World News, told the conference: “Universities have a very important contribution to make to address the global challenges covered by the SDGs. That is why we have created an SDGs hub, an entire section on University World News giving space to ongoing coverage of this vital contribution. “From now on we will be working closely with IAU and other higher education organisations to identify, share and promote best practice to our worldwide audience and the audiences of our partners.” Photo Compliments of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) Nic Mitchell is a UK-based freelance journalist and PR consultant specialising in European and international higher education. Follow @DelaCour_Comms on Twitter. Nic also blogs at www.delacourcommunications.com.

Prestigeonline.com NEW YORK, Dec 1 - Investments into protecting and better managing the world's ecosystems need to reach $384 billion a year by 2025, more than double their current levels, to guard against the threats of climate change and loss of natural resources, the U.N.'s environment watchdog said on Thursday. The calculation will inform a biodiversity summit starting next week in Montreal, Canada, where countries will try to agree on a deal to protect nature and wildlife from further losses and degradation of species and landscapes. Currently, $154 billion is spent every year, mainly by governments, on actions to protect and better manage waters, land, air and wildlife, known as "nature-based solutions," the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) said in a report. "This will have to increase by several orders of magnitude if we are to tackle the triple crisis of land degradation, climate and nature," said Ivo Mulder, head of UNEP's climate finance unit. "About 50% of global GDP is dependent on healthy and well-functioning ecosystems (so) it shouldn't be too hard a stretch even if we are living through multiple crises" such as war in Ukraine and spiralling inflation, he added. Meanwhile, governments are spending $500 billion-$1 trillion a year on potentially damaging subsidies to fisheries, agriculture and fossil fuels, the report found. More than 100 nations signed up last year in the Chinese city of Kunming to work toward biodiversity protection, but they failed to agree on issues including funding conservation in poorer countries. This year's meeting was due to take place in Kunming, but the venue was changed because of its zero-COVID curbs. China will continue to serve as president. The last time world leaders signed a biodiversity pact, in Aichi, Japan, in 2010, they set targets to try to slow loss by 2020, none of which were met. Private sector actors, who account for just 17% of spending on nature-based solutions despite their commitments to reducing carbon emissions and deforestation, "will have to combine 'net zero' with 'nature positive'" UNEP said. Story originally published by Isla Binnie https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/nature-needs-384-billion-annually-by-2025-un-says-2022-12-01/

Increased Levels of Surveillance - Image: govinsider.asia Proposed Saudi Arabian smart city The Line appears to have been lifted straight from a science fiction film. Stretching 170 kilometres in length across the middle of the desert, The Line features mirrored skyscrapers looming more than 500 metres tall, with flying passenger pods swooping among them. The claims made of the planned city are nothing if not ambitious, promising “never-before-seen efficiencies in city functions”, according to its developer’s website. Among these include residents being able to satisfy all their daily needs within five minutes, zero carbon emissions, and autonomous services that use artificial intelligence. The Line today is still just a vision, but around the world, digital technologies are opening doors to the immense possibilities that smart cities can offer. Glimpse of the future “Digital technology is continuing to enhance the lives of citizens and cities’ competitiveness in the evolving world order,” Chew Men Leong, President of Urban Solutions at tech and engineering group ST Engineering, told its annual conference, Innotech 2022, late last month. This year’s Innotech conference was entitled “Digitalising a Smart, Secure and Sustainable World”. The event saw technologists discuss numerous digital technologies that will lay the foundations of the cities of tomorrow. One such technology is 5G, which boasts higher bandwidth and faster connectivity, enabling a proliferation of Internet of Things devices throughout smart cities, and seeing tech play a larger role in critical systems that require urgent, real-time responses, such as emergency services. It can also allow a greater proliferation of robots, which are already becoming commonplace in a number of sectors, from rehabilitation assistants in hospitals to companions for the elderly to guides in museums. Already, cities around the world are integrating such cutting-edge technologies, with the goal of bringing people better and more convenient services. In South Korea, the Busan Eco Delta Smart City features smart homes that come inbuilt with alarm clocks that greet you by name. Meanwhile, urban planners in Zurich can now use augmented reality to visualise buildings. In Singapore, the Punggol Digital District will have artificial intelligence-controlled lighting and elevators to improve energy efficiency. Big Brother Accompanying such technological advances, however, is a degree undercurrent of uncertainty and scepticism amid mounting concerns over surveillance and privacy. “Smart cities are nothing without surveillance,” says David Murakami Wood, a Professor of Critical Surveillance and Security Studies at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Criminology. For smart cities to run efficiently, networks of sensors must collect information about almost everything one can think of, he explains. That data can then be used to inform city planning decisions, such as whether roads need to be widened, or fed into technologies such as AI to automate certain processes. Despite the fact that such information has beneficial uses, it can also very easily be abused. “Information is power,” Wood says. “Much can be done with that information that is good, bad, profitable and dangerous. And all of those things have to be thought about.” The problem arises when the cities investing in such systems do not properly consider such factors, and instead focus solely on positive use cases. One way governments can help to protect people’s privacy is through regulation. The European Union, for instance, implemented its General Data Protection Regulation in 2018, requiring entities operating in the bloc’s member countries to comply with certain practices, such as seeking explicit consent to use an individual’s data for specific purposes. Securing digital cities The widespread collection of data comes with another concern: cybersecurity. “As we become increasingly digital, we also become more exposed to digital risks,” Lim Min Kwang, Chief Information Officer at the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA), told Innotech 2022. Smart cities are particularly vulnerable due to their heavy dependence on the IoT, which Wood says is often “the most undersecured set of protocols”. IoT devices are often small and made to be as cost-effective as possible, frequently rendering cybersecurity to protect them an afterthought, if it is built in at all. In Singapore, the CSA addresses this through a cyber-certification scheme that seeks to recognise enterprises with good cybersecurity practices. Its certificates serve as “a visible label to recognise enterprises that have implemented good cybersecurity practices,” Lim told the conference. Users can then feel more secure in the knowledge that the devices they are using and putting into their homes have a base level of security that is in accordance with national guidelines. Cities are not just for citizens The United Nations estimates that 68 per cent of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050 – an additional 2.5 billion people, not all of whom will be citizens of the countries they reside in. Yet many digital services in smart cities today are built only with citizens in mind. Take smart border control measures, for instance. Automated immigration clearance often uses facial recognition and biometric technology to expedite the process of people returning to their home countries. For migrant workers, however, the same technologies become a means of security surveillance, Wood says. Wood points out that there are constantly two different types of smart city technologies at play: empowering smartness that provides a good quality of life and a repressive smartness that stops others from even setting foot in certain places. “What we really need to be thinking about is who smart cities exclude,” he says. Technology is fallible, and when it becomes a gatekeeper of cities, it can greatly impact the lives of those whom its design may not favour. Take facial recognition technology, for example. In 2019, the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology published a study which found that facial recognition technology performed relatively poorly when analysing the faces of minorities such as women, people of colour, the elderly and children. Such failures in technological infrastructure can have real and devastating impacts on people. “Some people are infrastructurally empowered, and some are infrastructurally excluded,” Wood says. Just last year, Uber drivers accused the ride-hailing application’s facial recognition software of being racist and putting them out of work, Time magazine reported. The potential for digital technologies to do good is clear, and often undisputed. Whether in the present or in future, smart cities promise better and greener living through their embrace of cutting-edge technologies. But will what eventually emerges from all of the developments currently unfolding be a tech-augmented marvel or an oppressively monitored dystopia? As governments continue to pursue their smart city plans, it is perhaps time to reconsider the shape of regulation that will be required and the priorities smart city planners should maintain in order to best serve all who call cities home. Original article: https://govinsider.asia/secure-gov/cities-of-the-future-smart-sustainable-surveilled/