Last week, the Department of Systems Ecology at Stockholm University played host to back-to-back seminars by Profs. Jeremy Jackson and Nancy Knowlton. This was a rare opportunity to listen to two of the absolute greats in the field of marine ecology and conservation and an experience that threw the audience between hopeless projections of gloom to real encouraging examples of marine ecosystems revival.

A few weeks ago, the 18th session of the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore was held in Geneva. One key development were the steps taken by delegates from the UN World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)  towards a legally binding agreement to protect traditional knowledge and genetic resources from exploitation. Unfortunately indigenous groups attending this meeting claim they were excluded from this process.

That's the 100 billion dollar question (excuse the pun) posed in a recent article in the Environment by researchers Lorrae van Kerkhoffm, Imram Habib Ahmad, Jamie Pittok and Will Steffen. 100 billion USD per year is the amount of money proposed to be channeled to help developing countries mitigate and adapt with climate change. This funding target was agreed upon in Cancun at the 16th Conference of Parties meeting to the UNFCCC in December 2010.

Janine Benyus, President of the Biomimicry Institute, recently visited Stockholm during the 3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability. For us at Sustainable Development Update this was a longed-for opportunity to listen to her live. Now the video of her talk about entrepreneurship and biomimicry is available at the Symposium website.

These are some excerpts from an editorial that appeared in SDU already in 2007:

"Biomimicry... looks deep into nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems. Studying a little insect called the Namibian Beetle and its ability to pull water from fog in order to construct new much more effective water-harvesting sheets, that can be used for capturing water in for example dry agricultural systems, is an example of this. Another example is pharmaceutical companies using compounds found in rainforests for ideas for new medicines.

"Unequal distribution of the benefits of economic development are at the root of poverty. Despite efforts to address poverty, more than a third of the world’s population still live on less than $2 per day. This needs our immediate attention. Environment and development must go hand in hand."

This is among the central messages of the Stockholm Memorandum (pdf, 550 kB), which concludes that the planet has entered a new geological age, the Anthropocene, and recommends a suite of urgent and far-reaching actions for decision makers and societies to become active stewards of the planet for future generations.

This year, one of the major happenings on the sustainability radar is the 3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability in Stockholm, Sweden. The Symposium started today (16th May), and will run through the whole week with a series of plenary presentations, panel discussions and working groups sessions.

The major event of next year is without a doubt the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development - Rio+20 - conference. This will take place in Brazil on 4-6 June 2012 to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), in Rio de Janeiro. It is a conference at the highest possible level, meaning that Heads of State and Government will participate and aim to produce a focused political document. The Conference will focus on two themes: (a) a green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication; and (b) the institutional framework for sustainable development. We give you a short run-down of what Green Economy is.

Bill Clark held an extremely interesting plenary, entitled "The Grand Challenges of Sustainability Science" at the Resilience2011 conference in Tempe, Arizona. The video of this talk, and all other plenery talks, are now available at the Resilience 2011 website.

Bill Clark is the Harvey Brooks Professor of International Science at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government - for a full profile, guide your browsers here. The slides of his talk, and all the others, are also available.

In his talk, Bill Clark mentioned that Robert Kates has created a Reader on Sustainability Science and Technology. The reader is publicly available on the Center for International Development‘s website at Harvard University.

This excellent resourcer is aimed at for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students of sustainability science and contains links to almost a 100 articles and book chapters.