Reflections on sustainable development and management – challenges, their causes, and possible solutions

We are delighted to express our congratulations to the 44^th six-month course on environmental management (EM44) participants at CIPSEM for completing the course in July. They started their journey in January 2021 and became familiar with many different topics, including conservation and restoration ecology, water and atmosphere, soil and land resources, sustainable urban and regional development, waste management and circular economy, and renewable energy and energy efficiency, climate change and SDGs.

Since EM44 was the first fully online six-month course due to the pandemic, all lectures took place as online live meetings. After several content-related sessions, the last live session of the course on July 02 2021, was organized as a round table dialogue led by Prof Dr Jochen Schanze. It was an opportunity for the participants to discuss, reflect and exchange their thoughts on environmental management in the light of their versatile professional and regional backgrounds. Following six months of learning and enhancing their knowledge and skills within the field of environmental management, it was time to talk about the conclusions individually drawn by the participants regarding the key challenges of sustainable development and natural resources management, the key causes of these challenges, and the possible ways to overcome these causes and face the challenges. Three central dimensions could be drawn from the exercise:

1. the dimension of knowledge (meaning educational institutions and science),
2. the dimension of governmental institutions, and
3. the dimension of the social (meaning micro and macro aspects).

Challenges and their causes

Within the dimension of knowledge, the participants characterized environmental management as challenged by a lack of education and knowledge transfer caused by a lack of understanding, poor transfer and translation of available knowledge, and the undervaluation of environmental issues. By regretting the challenging distance and gap between education and politics, and – thus – between education and policies, they located the identified causes within governmental institutions.

Besides this institutions’ distance to knowledge and the lack of its application, even if a scientific base was available, further obstacles within the dimension of governmental institutions impeding environmental management were identified. These include that governments usually do not pursue long term plans, do not design long term policies and do not (effectively) implement existing policies. Those points oscillated between the status of “challenge” and “cause” during the discussion since they were also named causes for the identified institutional challenges. In this respect, the perceived challenging lack of policies or their ineffective implementation could be linked to the reason that developed policies sometimes are locally not suitable and applicable, which was discussed as a cause.

As a further challenge, participants described the low representativeness of key stakeholders in co-governance processes. This point was underlined by being mentioned as a cause as well. Regarding this, participants highlighted that participation and integration of people within governance processes is usually deficient. Overall and generally speaking, the participants outlined the challenges for sustainable development arising from poor governance and resources management structures. Several perceived causes were discussed concerning such challenges, including a lack of methodology within planning and monitoring processes and limited integral planning practices based on science. Reviewing politics, the participants criticized the little political will and resistance towards sustainability including budgetary limitations and the preference of economic growth over environmental issues. Furthermore, corruption and an unclear allocation of responsibilities within institutions were named causes for institutional challenges for sustainable development and management of natural resources. At the country level, the group added that a politically instable scenario could impede the institutional involvement regarding environmental issues, e.g. in terms of behaviour transformation, which was discussed as insufficient and challenging.

With this, we arrive at the dimension of the social. Looking at the micro level or rather practices to influence it, the participants identified still a fixed mindset within the society. They regretted the fundamental challenge of changing living habits and manners due to individual resistances to change behaviours that contribute to global warming and depletion of natural resources. At the macro level, socio-economic inequality was mentioned as a challenge because environmental dangers confront those groups of people who are already disadvantaged in terms of living conditions. In contrast, those in better socio-economic positions can afford to keep out of environmental dangers’ ways.

Solutions

Having highlighted the challenges and their causes, let us now turn to the proposed solutions to improve environmental management! While a change in attitudes was cited towards the dimension of the social, several pathways were discussed within the dimension of knowledge. Educational institutions and science were taken into account in terms of their responsibility to generate new knowledge on environmental issues and to continue their work on improved technologies. In the participants’ opinion, education and science should provide expertise and actively educate and vividly share this knowledge to make sure that it gets used, e. g. to develop policies. Therefore, attendees requested educational institutions and science to enhance their involvement regarding boundary work, e. g. through an extended participation of scientific stakeholders outside of science.

Reversely and regarding the dimension of governmental institutions, those bodies were invited to integrate scientific stakeholders and, of course, other various voices, e. g. empower women’s participation and take into account local people’s demands. This approach could pave the way for holistic work and science-based policies that might face the above-discussed aspect of locally unsuitable policies. Multiplied responsibilities for reporting and highlighting environmental issues, which were considered necessary, could support these planning processes. Having said that, it should be noted that the participants strongly recognised the need to overcome current paradigms as the dichotomy environment versus economic growth. Thus, participants propose two ways for governmental institutions to get involved in the change of attitudes: Firstly, regarding attitudes and thinking patterns within the institutions; secondly, concerning the participants’ idea that governmental institutions might implement (non-)economic measures to influence people’s environmental action positively. After all, they affirmed the need to expand governmental capacities to settle the above claims directed to these institutions and their general call for improved governance.

Conclusion

In summary, we can see that there are many challenges to be dealt with and lots of topics to be covered. Doing so, one must bear in mind that the discussed dimensions are rather seen as intertwined than disjoint. This should have become as clear as the fact that sometimes it might be difficult to unambiguously state whether one aspect can be seen as a cause or a challenge or if it simply can be considered both. In practice, it presumably is more helpful to consider every dimension side by side and interconnected anyway if we want to address ourselves to facing the discussed challenges, overcoming the mentioned causes, and realising the proposed solutions.

Making a difference: ways to reduce your carbon footprint – Individual conclusions of the EM44 participants

About three weeks ago, CIPSEM finished the 44^th UNEP/UNESCO/BMU International Postgraduate Course on Environmental Management for Developing Countries. The participants retrospectively state that CIPSEM acted as a platform and catalyst to connect people from different countries and continents who are unified regarding their will to bring about changes and their shared mission: to make this world a better place!

What is meant by that is to commit oneself to a sound environmental action and to take responsibility for the environment. This is important not only for businesses or the industrial sector, but also, according to the participants, at individual levels. Hence, they stress that aspects of green lives, sensitivity to environmental impacts of lifestyles and action, and carbon footprint reduction are essential, current, and of global relevance. Respective conclusions regarding key goals of environmental management drawn by the participants are the following:

• The reduction of greenhouse gas,
• The consequent reduction of the carbon footprint, and
• The increase of green productivity.

Against this backdrop, they summarize that every step, every action, every measure – whether taken at the global level or the level of a country, region, city, community, family and individual – is a big and important one for environmental stability. Thus, one question came across the group: What can each one of us do to help achieve the above goals? For this, two aspects of the course seemed to be very important: First, the ecological footprint exercise helped raise environmental awareness regarding individual lifestyles and gave the opportunity to re-think one’s habits and everyday choices. Second, a fellow’s presentation covering how individual action helps lessen negative environmental impacts. In this light, the participants declared their goal to positively adjust their behavior based on the gained knowledge on sustainable living to reduce their environmental impact and carbon footprint in their environments. For that, the participants generously and creatively put together their and our course coordinators’ conclusions for an informative poster presenting proposals of small actions to answer the question presented above. CIPSEM and EM44 believe that small individual steps in daily actions can be constructive for collectively creating changes. Thank you very much to all of the EM44 participants for your commitment! We are happy to present the poster, developed by the EM44 participant Subha Niranjan, below!