BU Research Blog

Workshop – UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): International Academic Collaboration for Transformational Industry and its Social and Environmental Impacts

Location: Safra Auditorium, FEAUSP Library

Responsible: Profs. Isak Kruglianskas (FEAUSP) and Luisa Huaccho Huatuco (York University)

Realization: USP, Fapesp and British Council

Summary: (for more information, click here).

As part of the UN’s 2030 agenda, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the new drivers for promoting sustainability among stakeholders in developed and developing economies. SDGs comprise 17 goals, 169 objectives and more than 200 indicators and are meant to reduce inequalities and help organisations facing sustainability issues in all dimensions (economic, social and environmental).

The UK is a developed country with a long history of industrialization. However, in recent years there has been a rise on sustainability concerns, which are now reflected in the UK’s current industrial strategy with a commitment to ‘Cleaner growth’. Brazil is a developing country which is both rich in natural resources and has a wealth of industries. Making progress towards achieving the SDGs is of clear importance to both countries.

The proposed workshop aims to tackle: SDG #12 “Responsible consumption and production” (especially in the UK), and SDG#9 “Build Resilient Infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation” (especially in Brazil).

From the operations and performance management perspective, industrialists are struggling to identify: how can they plan and operationalize their activities according to this new agenda, and how to measure their progress towards achieving SDGs. Despite the attempts to deal with sustainability performance in a systematic and effective way, this issue still lacks consensus and requires new approaches and methods.

This workshop will gather UK and Brazilian academics to discuss key pressing SDGs challenges faced by industrialists. Through action research, the workshop will go beyond presentations and activities by providing tangible actions/measures to be proposed to industrialists to tackle the key pressing challenges. The workshop will help ECRs and post-docs to become established academics and to foster long-term research collaborative relationships among their groups at their home institutions.