Monday 26 March 2012

STEPS at PLANET UNDER PRESSURE

The STEPS Centre is mounting a variety of exciting activities at the Planet Under Pressure conference in London, this week (March 26-29): convening a key session, taking part in four other sessions, hosting an evening event to launch our book series, exhibiting with a stand and recording video interviews for our Rio+20 project.

Key Session
Tuesday: Adrian Ely is convening a key session, chaired by STEPS director Melissa Leach, entitled Pathways to Sustainability: opening up diverse technological futures in the green economy. We are delighted that Lawrence Gudza (Practical Action, South Africa) and Dinesh Abrol (National Institute for Science, Technology and Development Studies, India) are among those taking part. The session will be held on Day 2 of the conference at 10.30am in Room 1.

Other sessions
Monday: Adrian Ely is on a panel discussing Global environmental change and sustainable development in least-developed countries from 16.00-17.30 in the ICC auditorium

Wednesday: Adrian Ely presenting in a session entitled Governance of Emerging Technologies in the Context of Sustainable Development, on Wednesday 28 March, 4pm, Room 4.

Wednesday: Alan Nicol will be presenting in a session entitled Collective governance of shared resources: examples of sustainable approaches for complex multi-scale 'commons' at 16.00-17.30,

Thursday: Adrian Ely will be on a panel discussing Research and policy for sustainable consumption: what is needed? at 15.00-16.30 in Room 12.

Evening drinks book launch
Tuesday: And, at 5.30pm on the evening of Day 2 – Tuesday 27 March – we will be holding a drinks event to celebrate the launch of our Pathways to Sustainability book series, published by Routledge-Earthscan.

Melissa will joined at the event by Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, who will say a few words. As well as two new books in the series to discuss – there will be drinks and nibbles and plenty of opportunity to wind down and chat after a hard day's conferencing. The event will be held in the Connaught room of the Raamada Docklands Hotel (next to Exel).

Exhibition stand
We will have a stand in the exhibition area, where will be launching our Pathways to Sustainability book series and a variety of STEPS materials will be available, including free CDs of our two films, on maize innovation and water justice, and Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto. You can also take part in our Rio+20 video project, see below.


Video: Hopes for Rio+20
We're asking people at Planet Under Pressure and other events to tell us what sustainable development issue they want to see addressed at the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June. If you are at PUP, you can record your response at our stand in the exhibitor area. Here are a selection of the responses we have collected so far:

You can also contribute your own messages for Rio+20 by commenting on our blog.
If you are at the conference, please do come and say hello at one of our events.
Also keep an eye on our Rio+20 and Beyond page, where will be posting material about our engagements at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in June 2012.