Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
14.3.3
Asian Integrated Education and Training
for Future Earth
At the time of writing, debate is continuing on how best to meet the FE requirements
for “capacity building among the scientific and other stakeholder communities to
strengthen integrated research for sustainability and the uptake of this research in
decision-making processes”. One option could be to build on the environmental
leader programs to form collaborations between Japanese universities such as To-
hoku University and other centres with similar expertise and objectives within Asia.
Although this is still at an early conceptual development stage, such an initiative
could develop, apply and promulgate innovative education which internalises the
expertise and practical wisdom of stakeholders in a trans-professional and trans-
discipline approach, encouraging mutual learning among natural and social science
and humanities, and responding to social needs. It could:
• establish processes for early engagement of stakeholders (including national, re-
gional and local governments, industry and voluntary groups) in mutual learning
and co-design of the centre's priorities and activities;
• apply co-design to broaden the existing environmental leader focus of current
initiatives to the global sustainability and SDG agenda;
• co-design, develop and promote educational materials, teaching and training
methodology to support the implementation of training programs at participating
centres,
• formalise and strengthen existing Asian regional links with specified education
programs (or plans) in each collaborative center;
• strengthen mutual learning within other Asian Environmental Leader programs
and Higher Education for Sustainable Development networks.
The objective would be to stimulate interest among young researchers (postgradu-
ates and postdocs) in the trans-disciplinary approach of FE, and provide them with
an opportunity to hone their trans-disciplinary perspective and understanding of the
issues which FE is seeking to address. At the same time, education programmes
may also be offered to stakeholders (e.g. local government, local companies) to
provide knowledge and understanding of the rationale and need for Future Earth,
thereby strengthening their role as stakeholders.
While this debate over the longer term response to Future Earth is continuing, it
does appear a likely trend that environmental leader program students will need to
have greater insights into the relationship between science, engineering and society
and its stakeholders at large.
In an attempt to help towards this objective and also to shed light on the apparent
conundrums listed earlier on the failure of society to accept and act on some types
of scientific knowledge, the lecture on which this chapter is based used a range of
experiences after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami to pose a series of questions to
the students. These are designed to illustrate the point that many scientific insights
are open to different interpretations, that the message conveyed may depend on the
