CSER Chair Professor Partha Dasgupta, in collaboration with Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan (Atmospheric Sciences, UCSD) and Archbishop Roland Minnerath, convened a high-level workshop on global sustainability from the 2nd-6th of May in the Vatican, Italy.
The 5 day workshop addressed crucial concerns over the relationship between human technological progress, the degradation of natural capital, and economic growth. It brought together luminaries from across a range of fields united by environmental concerns – these included climate scientist and policy advisor Hans Schellnhuber, economists Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs, international law expert Edith Brown Weiss, and CSER cofounder Lord Martin Rees.
“Our idea is not to catalogue environmental problems. We propose instead to view Humanity’s interchanges with Nature through a triplet of fundamental, but inter-related Human needs – Food, Health, and Energy – and ask our respective Academies to work together to invite experts from the natural and the social sciences to speak of the various pathways that both serve those needs and reveal constraints on Nature’s ability to meet them.”
Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Nature: Our Responsibility
