Innovative Initiatives (Asynchronous Session)
Welcome to Geological Agriculture: The Study of Growing Plants in Rocks without Soils and Fertilizers View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Richard Campbell
Geological agriculture or GeoAg shows us how to use the rocks of the Earth to produce food and improve water health. For over 25-years, Richard Campbell and his family have been studying and refining GeoAg, growing over 100 plant types in rocks without the use of fertilizers and soil. Today, over 2,000 people from Atlanta, Washington, DC, and New York have been trained in the basics of GeoAg, enhancing access to nutrition in food insecure zones. The rules of agriculture with rocks are very different that the rules of agriculture with soil, fertilizers, and or hydroponically. Campbell has documented his family's twenty-five year experience with GeoAg in the book River Stones Grow Plants with includes contrbutions from Tennessee State University and George Washington University. This book outlines the rules of geological agriculture. With rock types having varying nutrient output values, Campbell and his team of university partners have to recreate a similar book for each country using the rocks of the specifc country, using local seeds. With the advent of GeoAg governments and countries can technically and appropriately address many of the UN's Sustainability Development Goals. We start with testing local rocks and showing populations how to grow microgreens and sprouts in rocks delivering food access in fourteen days. We continue with sharing indoor and outdoor GeoAg low cost micro-farming techniques and knowledge in how to grow an full array of plants. Those who know about GeoAg methodologies can technically address hunger relatively quickly as rocks are abundant.
Acting Responsively while Reasoning Comprehensively: Empirical Insights in Balancing Here-and-now Project Dynamics with Long-term Global Sustainability Goals View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anne Loeber, Barbara Regeer, Kristiaan Kok
The maxim “think globally act locally” translates into serious project management challenges. How can the ambition to meet global goals be balanced with the need to design projects ‘responsively’, that is, by taking local stakeholders’ needs and concerns into account? This is especially difficult for multi-level innovation projects that aspire sustainability-informed societal transformations. In addition, working towards implementing global sustainability goals implies the need to "open up" existing routines, rules, values, and assumptions embedded in the institutions and practices that have co-evolved with earlier, ‘unsustainable’ modes of socio-technological development. This may hold adverse implications for those involved in local initiatives - implications that those actors may wish to avoid. This paper draws on two transformative innovation projects that each sought to be responsive to participants’ needs and circumstances in their own way while at the same time addressing global sustainability issues. Although they focus on different problems (multi-level EU food system transformation, and rural development in the Netherlands), both deploy participatory methods to navigate between local action and global complexity. By bringing these two cases together, we are able to draw lessons on how to productively engage with this tension beyond the usual focus on participatory project dynamics. A key finding is that project organizers need to take on a variety of roles and attitudes to cater for the participatory experimentation processes and for the project’s efforts to scale-up resulting innovations, and to help participants make sense of different scales of systemic complexity.
Effectiveness of Standards to Evaluate Cities’ Sustainability and Smartness for Advancing “Sustainable Peace”: Role of Technology Advancement View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mandeep Taneja
The increasing global population's impact reflects the expanding number of new cities and swelling populations in existing cities, leading to a dearth of resources and growing discontent. 'Smart sustainable city' (SSC) concept arose to enhance technology inclusion in city solutions with an optimistic view of sustainable development. Additionally, missing the concomitant existence of conflicts in an urban context. Sustainable peace has emerged from the shadow of conflict resolution to capture the entire peace ecology of Peace, Security, Sustainability, Equity, and Gender. The research explores how effectively International Standard Organization (ISO) and United 4 SSC (U4SSC-ITU) standards evaluate cities' sustainability and smartness for advancing sustainable peace. While the study explored effectiveness through three significant perspectives, it utilized mixed methods triangulation with interviews, indicator-parsed statistics, and document review: First, the standard's applicability on all diverse cities, considering concurrent existence of conflicts and development. Second, the study utilized taxonomy to estimate the sustainability-smartness balance correlated with interviews. Lastly, the study selected common assessed cities and correlated interview responses to explore the standard's potential to indicate technology solutions and policy decisions. The research infers that sustainable peace and its novelty necessitates highlighting and recommends expanding standards to aggregate indicators to measure complex nature, intensity, and reasons for the conflict that can become a macro-indicator for peacebuilding. Moreover, technology infusion influenced sustainable development depends on political leadership and citizen leadership. Finally, the role of standards to indicate technology solutions for improvement is implicit, especially with ongoing exercises of benchmarking, knowledge sharing, and networking amongst cities.
