Brown Bag Seminar: The Global Sustainable Development Report

Abstract

Dr. Peter Messerli will be discussing the results of the Global Sustainably Report.  The Report, requested by all countries to evaluate progress on the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, is the first of its kind since the landmark Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted four years ago. Entitled “The Future is Now: Science for Achieving Sustainable Development,” the report finds that the current development model is not sustainable, and the progress made in the last two decades is in danger of being reversed through worsening social inequalities and potentially irreversible declines in the natural environment that sustains us. The scientists concluded that a far more optimistic future is still attainable, but only by drastically changing development policies, incentives and actions.

Speaker biography

Peter Messerli is professor for sustainable development at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and the director of the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE). As a land system scientist and human geographer his research interests lie in the sustainable development of social-ecological systems in Africa and Asia. He focuses on increasingly globalized and competing claims on land, rural transformation processes, and spatial manifestations of their outcomes in the Global South. Peter Messerli has lived and worked more than 10 years in Madagascar and Laos directing large-scale research projects focusing on inter- and transdisciplinarity. Committed to engaged and transformative sustainability science, he has acquired an extensive experience in science-policy interactions from the local to the global level. Peter Messerli is the co-chair of Future Earth’s Global Land Programme (GLP) and was appointed in 2016 by the UN Secretary General as the co-chair of the group of 15 independent scientists drafting the UN Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) of 2019.

Peter.Messerli@cde.unibe.ch  

http://www.cde.unibe.ch/about_us/personen/prof_dr_messerli_peter/index_eng.html