Transformations to Sustainability, an ISC short film

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T-Learning (a Rhodes University ELRC project, funded by the International Science Council)
T-Learning (a Rhodes University ELRC project, funded by the International Science Council)

The International Science Council (ISC) has released a short film that speaks to Transformations to Sustainability, a topic that has the Anthropocene in its focus.

“Achieving sustainability is not a techno-scientific problem; it is first and foremost a social and political problem. Why are we not transforming, given the urgency? Who should decide when, how and towards what we should be transforming?” (The International Science Council).

Professor Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard University, opens explaining that “the problem is that we are facing a world in which critical limits are looming and we have to somehow as a planetary collective, change out ways if we expect to have a world that looks in any way habitable for the human spieces, but also the other specicies that share the planet with us”

The researchers who feature in this short film include Distinguished Professor Heila Lotz Sisitka, of the Environmental Learning Research Centre (ELRC) at Rhodes university, among other leading researchers, with the film describing 15 research projects that were funded by the ISC from a period from 2016 to 2022.

Professor Lotz Sisitka is quoted saying “the spaces and places that one comes from and lives in influences how you think about transformations to sustainability. In South Africa it is impossible to think about transformations to sustainability without thinking about social justice and historical inequalities... Transformations to sustainability needs to think about us all together on one planet, and about both human well-being as well as planetary well-being”

See this link for the full video.

Other stories of sustainability that are linked to the ELRC’s T-Learning project, and funded by the ISC, are available here