In the third edition of Earth5R’s Sustainable Futures podcast series titled ‘The Culture Of Sustainability’ Benno Werlen, a UNESCO Chair on Global Understanding for Sustainability engages in conversation with Founder and Environmentalist Saurabh Gupta
The discussion centers on the importance of integrating arts, humanities, and culture into sustainability efforts, highlighting how it’s not just about saving the planet, but saving ourselves. Benno Werlen, UNESCO Chair on Global Understanding for Sustainability, argues for education reform to make learning more practical and effective, and emphasizes the need for bottom-up approaches where citizens actively participate in sustainable decision-making. He also offers valuable advice for young people on connecting with others in the field to drive impactful change.
Chapters:
- Introduction: Local Action, Global Goals
- Global Sustainability and Innovation
- The Jena Declaration
- Knowledge Mobilisation
- Institutional Challenges
- Guidance for Future Professionals
Conversation
Module 1: Introduction: Local Action, Global Goals
Saurabh: So, welcome to the Sustainable Futures Podcast. Today, we are honored to have Professor Benno Werlen with us. Professor Werlen is a global leader in sustainability, holding a prestigious UNESCO Chair on Global Understanding for Sustainability. He is the founder and executive director of the International Year of Global Understanding and the Jena Declaration, both of which have made significant strides in the field of sustainability. His work has earned him numerous accolades, including the Outstanding Teacher’s Award from the University of Jena, the Laureate D’honneur from the International Geographical Union for his lifelong contribution in the geographical science, and the Best Practice Award from the European Commissioner for Alphalete Project. He is also a distinguished guest at the American Association of Geographers’ annual conference in San Francisco. It’s a privilege to have such an impactful figure in the world of sustainability with us today. Professor Werlen, thank you so much for joining us today.
Benno: Yeah, thank you, Saurabh, for having me, for having me part of your project.
Saurabh: Yeah, thank you. So, Professor Werlen, we’ll start with understanding a bit more about your work. We’ll start with understanding the local action and global goals that you have been promoting. So you have had a long career in the field of sustainability. What are some of the key moments that shaped your journey?
Benno: Yeah, you know, when you get older, the journey is getting longer and longer. So, in fact, when I did my studies in the 1970s, in the cold year period in Fribourg and Switzerland, I was also studying agricultural economics. And in that field, I was following over several years’ presentations from representatives of the FIO and other UN organizations situated in Geneva, Switzerland. So we had once a month a presentation about the big problems humanity is facing. It was the time of limits to growth from the Club of Rome. And that was an important text to discuss and have been commented on by different people from the just-mentioned organizations.
And I was then involved in a field trip, two-month field trip to Africa in 1977. Wow. And we visited Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, and what it was called in Zaire. And I was struck by the fact that I could see the agriculture there. I was thinking, gosh, if they would have better instruments and if they could be told how they should put the different plants together and the orientation of the plants, the sunlight and so on. So with very little money, agricultural production could be improved considerably. And turning back, I was then writing a dissertation in economics, more than 100 pages long, on the very humble question if ecological agriculture could solve the problems of nutrition in the world. I mean, if they could overcome famine. And I did then several weeks long practicing internship in an ecological farm in the logic of anthroposophical thinking on Rudolf Steiner. And so I got familiar with ecological agriculture then. And my conclusion was that it could work to save the problem, to solve the problem of famine in the world through ecological agriculture, just by the fact it’s not that intensive in capital, and it could easily reach a lot of people without a big amount of money.
So my conclusion was it would work, but it needs a lot of institutional reforms. And I was a little bit skeptical because I learned that in Africa, in Eastern Africa, people called cars, not cars, but just called them Toyota. I was a little bit pessimistic about whether my ideas could succeed in that same region, because I’ve been very much already taken into the global capitalist production system and so on and so forth. So I did then a dissertation on the critique of functionalism in geography, social sciences, and I became aware that the problems that I saw in ecological respect very much linked to the geographical world you established across the world, because people were thinking about spaces, they were talking about countries, they were talking about the firm world and all this kind of vocabulary that I saw totally inappropriate for the problems we are facing. So I was then first of all to study an alternative theoretical perspective for geography, and I did it with my PhD. The proposition was to change geography from an earth-space science to a science of action, that geography is not studying on categorizing the world according to spatial categories or principles, but that the idea of geography should be to study scientifically how people make geography in their everyday life, meaning taking into account the way people themselves see the world and not just telling them what to do without being interested in the way they are doing it, or even categorizing them as underprivileged, underdeveloped, and so forth by spatial categories, the firm world, the global south, and so on and so forth.
And of course, this was not expected by the community of geographers worldwide, I remained rather an outsider in my concept, and I was very much also contested, if you break the paradigm, you can’t hope that everybody likes you, that’s how the world is. But then, people from international geographical communities got interested in what I’m doing, and I was invited to take over a commission of the International Geographical Union called the Cultural Approach in Geography. Through that, I was then invited to conceptualize or to help to conceptualize, first of all, an international UN year on a geographical topic and cultural topic.
Professor Benno Werlen attending the 33rd International Geographical congress in China
And I was not satisfied with the first draft, and I was saying, if you want, in fact, if you want that I continue to work on this, I want to have the possibility to present my own proposition. And I did that and conceptualized the International Year of Global Understanding. The fact that people need to understand this, the ongoing globalization, to understand how much their everyday life in certain places is influenced or determined by global processes and how the local life is affecting the global level.
So how people can do things to contribute to the solution of global problem constellations. This was then accepted internally in the framework of geography. And then I presented it, first of all, to all the presidents of the natural scientific organization in Paris.There are, if I remember correctly, 75 disciplines that are all from physics to biology and so on, with all the presidents and general secretary. And I presented there the International Year of Global Understanding and made them aware what they are seeing as the global challenges, as they called their project, is in fact, determined by problematic human actions, especially since the Industrial Revolution, and so on, and showing them just how the changes in production forms has, in fact, on the global climate and so on in a, you know, and different cultures of lifestyles, how much they are affecting differently, different aspects of the physical world. And I was claiming that it’s impossible or not scientifically not sound to reduce problems of humanity to natural scientific problems, so that we cannot just talk about the climate crisis and then ask politicians to solve the climate crisis.
But you have, first of all, to see, to understand in what cultural fields these problematic actions are embedded. So I was bringing people from the social sciences, also a project, and people from the humanities. And so I was in a certain form combining the different scientific areas to the personal link I established among them, with the International Year of Global Understanding.Then the second step in that, after long negotiations and hundreds of meetings around the planet.
Saurabh: And which year was this?
Benno: That was, I started that in 2008.
Saurabh: Okay.
Benno: To the scientific unions in March 2011.
Saurabh: Okay.
Benno: And the idea was to launch the international year in 2012, for 2012. But the process was so slow to have these negotiations among the scientific unions. And then the question was, how to approach UNESCO? Because it was clear, if you want to have an international year on a scientific issue, it has to be supported by UNESCO. Otherwise, it would never happen. And so I was looking for a supporting country that was a complicated, complex, complicated issue. And I was somehow then involved in the role of diplomats on the scientific, that’s not the easiest task to take on.
But finally, I succeeded to find Rwanda, who was ready to, by the decision of ministerial governments, to take the lead in that process. And then the African Union was ready to take it on. It was part of the political agenda of the African Union.And finally, I went through all levels of the decision-making process of UNESCO, of course, first to bring it in for the executive board. And this was really a remarkable minute in my lifetime to be present in the executive board meeting when my project was discussed and how it was debated and then passed through without any changes. And then later on, it was accepted by the General Conference of UNESCO.
And then it was ready to bring to New York. And in New York, when I was talking to, not the official plenary assembly, but I was talking to the representatives of all countries in the second largest room of…
Saurabh: Which year was that?
Benno: That was 2013, because in the meantime, we had given up the idea to have it in 2012, because everything was slowed down. So the idea was to have it in 2016, because we needed then a year between each decision and then one year of preparation and so on and so forth.
And that was also quite impressive to talk about all this. I had five minutes to present the project in the name of Rwanda and to see all these representatives from the United States, Russia, and the other city next representative of Russia, because Rwanda is alphabetically ordered and Rwanda is next to the person of Russia, which was not very interesting. That was what I was talking about, but it wasn’t important at that moment.
And then talking to the ambassadors of the UN, to each voting group, I was invited by Korea for Asia, I was invited by Mali for Africa, and Portugal for Europe and so on. Then I was quite optimistic that everything will work well, but we didn’t get the UN year, in fact. So it was, we proclaimed then in 2015, in the International Social Science Summit in Durban, it was proclaimed the International Year of Global Understanding, jointly with the natural sciences and the social sciences.
And yeah, that was, I mean, that moment of my career that I think for what I’m doing now, I’ve been very important. And after the success of, it was in fact much bigger than many of the UN official or UN international years, but far more than 1000 events on the global understanding issue across the planet in 2016. And then the International Council for Philosophy and the Humanities were taking on the idea to establish five UNESCO chairs on global understanding globally.And I was invited to get one of them. So I was starting the whole application process for the UNESCO chair, that’s quite complicated, and quite a long issue, takes time. And so that took, I guess, two years, all in all.
Professor Werlen’s Introduction as UNESCO Chair
And I was then nominated in 2016, I think, at the end of 2016. And was it early 17? I can’t remember exactly. No, in 2018, for four years until 2022, and another five years until another four years until 2026.So that’s, if you want the trajectory.
Module 2: Global Sustainability and Innovation
Saurabh: Yeah, that gives us quite an idea. And I understand that you had to go through several rounds of negotiations and presentations and amendments and quite long.So you learn a little bit about the institutional ordering of not only the UN, but also a lot of our readers are coming from a very diverse background. And they’re always looking forward to understanding that if they have some idea and how they could use it with institutions like the United Nations to get through or in terms of policy designing, this is very helpful. Coming to the next question, which is more on the side of global sustainability and innovation.And we would like to understand a bit more from the UNESCO chair perspective. So could you explain how the UNESCO chair supports new ideas and research in sustainability and what kind of impact they have globally?
Benno: Yeah, I mean, what people very, very often have difficulty to understand is they think that UNESCO chairs are paid by UNESCO. That’s not true. UNESCO chairs are applied by the National Commission for UNESCO. And they have to show that the university is able to sponsor that UNESCO chair. So UNESCO is interested to make sure that the university or the country that is applying makes sure that the chair has the financial and the personal background to function. So you have to prove that we have the money and we don’t get any money from UNESCO. You have to prove that you have the capacity to handle it. Exactly. And then the second important point is to know, and that explains then what the UNESCO chair in fact is, you have to show how much the program of the UNESCO chair can contribute to the fulfillment of the programs of UNESCO and the UN. So you are not, I mean, you have to have a scientific status, otherwise you wouldn’t be a professor. But the point is you have to show how much you can contribute to the programs of UNESCO.
And that shows how the structure is. In fact, the professors are not there to suggest programs for UNESCO and the UN. But it’s rather the other way around. These are the general conferences or the plenary assembly of the UN who are making the programs and or accepting the programs for the UN or UNESCO. And the professors are there to help the institution to reach their goals. So the professor is taking the lead in the discussion and not the professors are the agenda setters. The agenda setting are the administrations or the national representations of UNESCO and UN who are setting the agenda together with their staff. So in fact, you, of course, can contribute as I do or we do it on the basis of my scientific program or approach to make a contribution to UNESCO. And what is important to know, I think, what makes such a position attractive is that you are one of nearly 950 UNESCO chairs globally. So you are part of a network of UNESCO chairs and you can interact with them. Once they are close to your topic and so on, you can collaborate with them and you have a framework for your collaboration that you wouldn’t have otherwise. And there are so-called unit networks, several hundreds of them for topical orientation.
So you can also address them if you want to have something discussed or if you organize a conference, you can invite them and collaborate with them and contribute to their activities. So that’s, I think, the important point. But with a UNESCO chair, you have a huge network that is set up by the institutions of the UN and therefore you can have potentially a big impact in international policies, but you never would have if you just stay on the national level. So that’s, I think, the point that is important to know and to take in consideration.
UNESCO chair on Global Understanding For Sustainability Friedrich Schiller University, Germany.
Saurabh:Great. Any examples you have of any particular projects that have been taken by the UNESCO chair in terms of sustainability?
Benno: Yeah, I mean, you know, UNESCO has three fields of action and all these three fields of actions are right now combined with the sustainability agenda of the UN, the SDGs. And those three fields are education, science, and culture. So I try to combine the three in the global understanding. I mean, the understanding is the concept of the humanities and part of the social sciences, and this link to the cultural sphere, because culture is about meaning and communication and production of meaning and understanding of meaning.
And of course, the scientific part is the social scientific part, but geography is, in the German context, due to Humboldt, localized in the natural scientific faculties. I’m a member of the Faculty of Chemistry and Geosciences, so I have institutionally also the access to the natural sciences and also to my education, to both of them. So the examples of participation were then that on the local and national level, I was, or I am involved in a project with my colleague from nearby, Weimar, on the intangible cultural heritage, the organ.So I’ve been looking at what role this instrument is very important in religious music and so on all over Europe and even beyond. How the organ, the establishment of an organ instrument in the small communities and so on, we’re forging some kinds of solidarity and how it is created to reproduce the community level through religious celebrations, but also as a musical instrument and cultural instrument, so that we have culture and social sciences and human sciences related. Otherwise, I was involved in the book production of UNESCO, I was selected for the future of education. On that basis, I was invited finally to represent the European UNESCO chairs in a project of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO and the Science Council for the Social Sciences and Humanities of Canada on the production of future knowledge. So how should we produce knowledge for social transformation? Oh, interesting. And the project I submitted was to lead interviews with a certain number of leaders of UN and UNESCO programs in the field of sustainability and ecological domain, like man and biosphere and so on.
And the leaders in social sciences and humanities and presidents of different scientific unions, but also of international organizations, and several academies like the International Council of Science, like the Academia Europaea and so on. And the question, the main question I was asking them, or we were asking them, is why do they believe that we are missing the reach of the Agenda 2030 in time, despite the long-lasting engagement of the UN in sustainability issues from the early 1970s with man and biosphere, starting in the end of 1960s, if I remember correctly. And a lot of money has been invested also in technology and so on, and we are not moving forward. What is the reason for that? And that was quite interesting. We had all these interviews lasting one hour to two hours, each of them, and we were recording them, and then we transposed the transcription and sent them as a document, and then our conclusions, so they could check and revise if they wanted. And then we were writing this paper for this publication of the Canadian Commission and the Research Council, I mentioned.
Professor Werlen’s Induction into the Academia Europaea
And part of the project was also to discuss the results with some of the people that participated in the survey and others in the field. So we had an online conference, it was about 30 people from different parts of engagements, different versions of sustainability and so on, discussing the measures that should be taken to accelerate the speed for social transformation. And the key outcome was that the scientific approach is partly responsible for not reaching the most important agents of societal transformations, and these are the everyday people around the world, around the planet, with their everyday routines.If a change is not going into the everyday routine, the change will not be sustainable.
Becoming the Change Agent of Sustainability
So that was the outcome. And if you accept that, then we can say that one of the reasons that we are not moving faster forward is somehow the dominance of the natural sciences in the whole discourse, because it’s a scientific discourseAnd normal everyday people are not scientists, they are not familiar with the scientific language and the concept of the experts in all different domains of geosciences, of geotechnology, and so forth and so on. So the question is, how do you build the bridge between scientific knowledge, scientific insights, everyday practices, and their transformative potential to solve global problem constellations? Another outcome of the survey was that education is, for global problem constellations, absolutely not sufficient anymore, because we have a high specialization in disciplines, and the school curricula, in fact, mirror, to a certain extent, scientific research.
We have natural scientific disciplines, we have some philosophical or human sciences disciplines like literature and so on, and we have a little bit of political education, but everything is specialized, and it’s like a training camp for future scientists, and the school is not a training camp for future scientists. It’s not the school, it’s not a training camp for problem solving. So, in the phrasing of the people of the club of Rome, we need to overcome the silo, the knowledge of the school.
Saurabh: Also we need to make the information more digestible.
Benno: Yeah. So then the point is how to access people. Right. And then the point that follows is that interdisciplinarity is not a solution for global problem constellations for many reasons. One is, first of all, the data are all national and they are taken by different categorizations. You cannot aggregate them soundly. And different parameters also. Different parameters and so on. So we have global problem constellations and we have national solutions. It’s like politics. You only have a national discourse to solve global problems, but not a global discourse to solve national problems. And if you take that seriously, then you have to change the educational system from primary school up to university, and you have to change the whole knowledge production, meaning if you take into account what I said from the beginning on, that you need to take into account the cultural context of everyone living on this planet.
If you want to have a respectful way to get in touch with him, you have to accept the cultural context the other person is in as much as you are expecting that people are respecting your own cultural context. So if you accept that, then the idea of having agreements on international gatherings at the UN, how to solve the global problems, is absurd. I mean, if governments find a certain agreement, an agreement that can be accepted by the majority of the countries at least, how to transmit this into different cultural realms? Because it’s just a natural scientific solution and the diplomatic agreement, but not prepared that people should implement it. So you have to turn the whole thing upside down. You have to start working with communities in a transdisciplinary attitude, asking them how they are seeing the problem, looking if in their cultural, regional context, there are solutions, and how people deal with that kind of problem.
Saurabh: Yeah, a lot of solutions. One example is an Earth Fiverr app, we launched these challenges where people are sharing stories of their traditional ways of sustainability. For example, in India, there is a thing about using clay pots for cooking. So that is a very local solution, low carbon and natural and good for health. So people have been sharing a lot of stories and that gives us a lot of ideas about how sustainability is practiced in different cultures. And then you can find a lot of common grounds, but sometimes you have to respect that certain sustainability also has to be local.
Benno: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
You have to find a solution, a local solution for local problems.
You have to find a solution, a local solution for local problems, but based on proven facts and proven natural scientific insights.So turning things from upside down means problem definition by the people involved in the problem, they are part of the problem situation. And then social scientists, cultural anthropologists, geographers and so on that have a cultural sensitivity that are familiar with the local culture, are looking if there is other knowledge that could be useful to solve that situation from the natural sciences, from engineering, from other sectors and go in touch with them and say, what would you do to solve this problem there? So we can conclude from that, if you accept that, we have to conclude that international agreements are not the perfect way to solve global problems. It’s a possible way, but it’s not sufficient.Interdisciplinarity is not helpful because everybody is in his silo and looking for interconnection between scientific disciplines, but not with the agent that should apply that knowledge. So you need a transdisciplinary approach and consequently a paradigmatic change of the whole sustainability policies from a top-down logic to a bottom-up logic.
Saurabh: Exactly.
Benno: Or at least to have both at the same level of competence and reach. And this, I think, was then the outcome of the conference, we discussed that and people added more to the results of the survey. And from that, we then reached the question, what are we doing with these insights? How do you want to… And I said, okay, we can have a kind of manifesto of this event or maybe a declaration. And so people got quite enthusiastic about the idea of declaration and I was asked to put some text in the form of a declaration. So I did that with a couple of other participants in the conference and we called it then the Jena Declaration.
Module 3: The Jena Declaration
Saurabh:Exactly.
So I was coming to that question, your Jena Declaration, which is very interesting in terms of regional cultural sustainability. So the question is like, it’s a very important piece of work that you have played a key role in that Jena Declaration. So I’d like to know more about what exactly it is and how does it address the global sustainability challenges?
Benno: Yeah.
I mean, the Jena Declaration, the title is because it was the UNESCO chair of the Jena University who organized the survey and organized the conference. But on the other hand, it’s also symbolic to call it the Jena Declaration because the historical heritage of Jena has all the ingredients of the Jena Declaration. Jena is the place where modern ecology has been coined by Ernst Haeckel. . Hans Karl von Karlowitz is a member of the Alma Mater Jenaensis and he coined for the first time sustainability in 1714 and the way it’s used now in UN and UNESCO programs that are on the agenda 2030. And on the other hand, we had a movement starting from here, the Romantic Movement, who had the idea to have a combination of the natural scientists and the humanities to have a view of nature that is not emptied out of any meaning, to put it that way.
So we have all three parts that are in question of sustainability, sustainability itself, the ecological turnaround of sustainability in the phrasing of the UN and UNESCO. And the counter-movement somehow was addressed by the Romantic Movement, all three linked to Jena and therefore the Jena Declaration is a wonderful name for the ingredients of the declaration. So by telling the impact of the conference and its result, I was already giving the main lines of the Jena Declaration. To put it roughly, we can say the Jena Declaration is calling for a double shift of paradigm in sustainability research and sustainability policies.
The Jena Declaration: The Fruit of Professor Benno’s work
That’s, first of all, changing the logic, as already said, from top down to bottom up.
Saurabh: Yes.
Benno: That’s a solid integration of citizens’ view and citizen engagement in the sustainable transformation of societies. And always in line with the culture, with cultural backgrounds, you know, that’s compatible with the way people live. You can’t change the way of life of everybody in one lifetime.That’s impossible. So we have to find a solution within our lifetime to have better adoptions. And the second one is not from nature to culture, but from culture to nature.So we are looking at how nature is transformed by culturally shaped lifestyles.
Women Working in the field using cultural agricultural practices.
And with the study and knowledge of the lifestyle, looking for new forms of the less problematic transformations of a natural background. And this, on the third important point, that the Jena Declaration is not talking about the natural environment, because with our body, we are part of nature. So nature is our contemporary world, or in German, Mitwelt, and not Umwelt, not environment. We are part of nature. And we are not everything we do for healthy natural conditions, we do it for ourselves at the same time, and we don’t do it for the environment.
We do it for us, and for the species, right? So it’s not about something else. It’s about us, and it’s not the planet. It’s life forms on the planet. So we should also get rid of the phrasing to save the planet. That’s quite ridiculous. I mean, we are not able to save the planet.
Saurabh: That’s very egoistic.
Benno: The planet existed before the humans arrived, and the humans disappeared, so it can’t be the point. At the most, we can save humans.
We can save ourselves.
Saurabh:Yeah, yeah.
Benno: The planet is always going to be there.
Healthy, in fact, looking for healthy living conditions for all life forms. For all life forms, that’s true.
Saurabh:Yeah.
Benno: So that’s, in fact, I mean, then it’s also about education, the education to restructure the whole idea of education, changing the focus from educating to learning, so learning from one another.
Everyday people can learn from scientific stock of knowledge, but scientists can also learn from local stock of knowledge. You know how in earlier times solutions worked, or didn’t work, and so on. So these are a couple of points that are central in the logic of the Jena Declaration. And therefore, if you take that all together, it’s the conclusion to make better use of the insights of the humanities and the social sciences, especially the cultural aspects. But the problem here, in my experience, is that the humanities and the social sciences are by far not as well organized as the natural scientists are. And they all have maybe only a few percent of the budgets of the natural scientists, and the scientists’ organization, and the engineering organizations. So that makes them, in principle, very weak in the whole debates of how sustainability should be addressed. So that’s why I think that the arts need to play a stronger role in the whole sustainability issues, because the arts are creators of mindsets.
Saurabh:That’s true. Behaviors.
Benno: Like, they make people see the world in special ways, specific ways.
So consequently, the arts are the key drivers of world views. That’s true. Together with some scientific disciplines.
Saurabh:Like you just said, we can’t save the world. Yeah. That’s a shift of perspective.
Benno: Yeah. So, but of course, artists are very often, they have created their own world somehow. And of course, they are not as organized, by definition, can’t be organized like natural scientists. They need laboratories, and so on, so that they need to be organized. But still, to mobilize artists, not just to mirror, or being the illustrator of the vocabulary and the concept of the geosciences, not just reproducing Agenda 2030, but opening new directions of new lifestyles. And I think one of the points that is also embedded in the logic of the Jena Declaration, that we need to change the definition of a successful life. So far, successful lives are mirrored, in fact, by the amount of resource consumption somebody can have. 100 cars, 80 bathrooms, and so on. So that’s wealth, that’s success. Material success. So we need to make clear that this is not a success. This is the opposite of success in the sense of creating healthy conditions for everyone.
Saurabh: This is just the opposite.
Benno: Success can’t be linked to destruction. And today, success is mirrored by destructive ways of dealing with our natural basis, living conditions.
Having a jet for every meeting, two persons fly over the Atlantic or the Pacific to meet someone at the other end of the world. I mean, of course, that’s a kind of freedom, but we also need them to change the idea of freedom in that respect, if you want to have a sustainable world. So there you can see that the humanities, cultural sciences, and arts need to produce new images of the world and new images of a good life, somehow.
And that’s the link to the movement, but in other ways, yeah.
Saurabh: So in the Jena Declaration, are there any, apart from having an agenda that you have in the Jena Declaration, but also how would you implement, how do you want to implement it? Is there a plan for it?
Benno: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. A plan not very successful so far, I have to admit. The idea was that we produce a huge body of signatories, thousands and thousands of people that are signing the Jena Declaration to have an impact that we can approach the UN or UNESCO on saying, look, we have so many citizens that are really looking for a change of paradigm. But this is very complicated.It’s also part of our survey. We are in a world where echo chambers are growing, becoming more and more important, that people only want to hear what they think anyway, whether it’s based on empirical facts or not, or on so-called alternative truths, it’s very often not important. So this makes people very cautious in dealing with digital devices, like signing a declaration on an internet platform without knowing the people they are signing for or behind the Jena Declaration. So the summary after a year or two, nearly two years of implementation is that we haven’t been able to overcome or to combine the analog everyday world with signing on a digital platform, something with an impact.
Participating in the UNEP Workshop for the UN Future summit
We have now a solution or hope to have a solution to that, but it’s too early to talk about. So the idea is, as I said, to gather a huge amount of project partners, institutional supporters and signatories. We have now a little bit more than 40 project partners across the world, all of them in different countries.We have more than 200 institutional signatories, some with hundreds of thousands of members and so on, and then about a thousand individual signatories. But this is not the size we are looking for. So the idea is to overcome this gap between analog or world and digital signatures.
I mean, I can tell what the idea is, but we have to test it first, that we have for each and each institutional partner and each project partner, we have people that I’m familiar with. They are familiar with some people of the Jena Declaration through Exchange and Zoom and conferences, on-site conferences and so on. So this year they would be our partner of trust.
So people would sign the Jena Declaration on-site with the presence of that person of trust. And this person of trust is handing it over to us and we are filling it in on the platform. And then we will communicate to our partners of trust with the community on the other end, like your organization, hopefully very soon as well.And so that’s the way we can grow or there are others. Some are several, like your 700,000 participants. So if we can combine them, then maybe we can have such an impact on the institutional realities of science, of sustainability policies and bring to start the movement of peaceful transformation.That’s the most important idea. If you are forcing people to change their way of life, this can never be sustainable.
Saurabh: Yeah, it’s not sustainable.
Benno: It never has been, but it will be. And this is conflating. People need incentives to change.
So people have to see. I just have a new phrasing for the idea of the Jena Declaration, that it should be living sustainably with joy and engagement so that people are gaining something, gaining something when they change and they can express themselves. And that would then make them, would make it more attractive to take an engagement.
Yeah, that’s the idea. And for scientific logic, for research in a disciplinary way, we are looking for authority. You become a master of knowledge in your field.That’s the goal of the scientific career, becoming authority. But for the applied, this can’t be the goal to have as many citations as somebody was doing basic research or as much project money for any kind of activities like basic research or technological research. So the idea of applied science can’t be scientific success, but it can be authentic.Authenticity is then the idea of the good person in applied research who is trustful to the partners of the everyday world and the good mediator between science and everyday world in a trustful way. So that would be, being authentic would then be the claim and not the authority.
Saurabh: Yeah, that’s right. One example is like in Earth 5R app, we have a particular module in which people are concerned about the air quality in the area. They walk for a kilometer in the area using their mobile phone. And it has an inbuilt tool where it geotags your location and you can walk for a kilometer. First of all, you’re walking for a kilometer rather than using a car.
And then you count the trees in your locality and then you put it and that data goes in the public spaces and we measure hundreds of, you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands of kilometers across the country. And we know exactly that in this particular city, this particular stretch, what is the tree density? And with this comes the next part. Now citizens know that they are falling short in terms of trees in the area. They go for plantation programs. So one that’s input builds an output, which is pushing them to do more planting because they understand that they have, they need more trees in the area for better air quality. So yeah, there is an incentive also because the data is helping them to understand the gaps and then they’re filling those gaps.
Module 4: Knowledge Mobilisation
Saurabh: Right. Right. So in terms of knowledge mobilization through your work with the UNHCR declaration, you also dived into the concept of knowledge mobilization.
Could you explain a bit more for the audience?
Engaging with citizens in their everyday world. So that’s mobilizing the knowledge production adapted to the local and the cultural, local conditions and cultural context. So these are new forms of knowledge production
Benno: Yeah, that’s, I already described it in the fact that this is engaging with citizens in their everyday world. So that’s mobilizing the knowledge production adapted to the local and the cultural, local conditions and cultural context. So these are new forms of knowledge production.
And this would then, a subsequent idea that we are articulating living labs in the so-called as learning models and not as educational models so that children, young people can experience certain conditions and experiencing the difficulties and then looking for solution and knowing that there is an abstract way to deal with it, but there’s also on concrete level of implementation. So that this rich building process of knowledge production, production, knowledge application is part of processes at all levels of learning or traditionally called of education at primary school is easier or simpler conditions at the direct local context. And then with aging, this can be more complex situations.And yeah, that’s knowledge mobilization through practice in practical situations. That’s not, I mean, this is not against scientific ways of dealing with reality at all. This need, we need to have a disciplinary way of knowledge production.
And only less than 1% of the people in primary school will end up in some science close or scientific enterprise, or I don’t know exactly, but certainly not more than 1%. So why do we bother 99% with the logic that they will never be, they never can succeed and can’t succeed because other people have also to do other things than research.And that’s, I mean, if you take that in account, and if you agree on that, then we really need to change schooling at all levels somehow. And if a member of the UN Declaration or Blumenthal, he has the project Kids on Earth, he’s been doing interviews for many years already with kids around the world, how they are seeing the world. Of course, these are kids that have digital devices, so that’s a certain selection.
But still, they all are saying that school, what they learn there has less and less to do with their life they are living on this planet. You know, its logic is from the 19th century, and we are now in the 21st century. And it would be a miracle if still everything would be adapted to our today’s living conditions.
So we need to take into care how people live today, how even the job markets and so on are changing radically in rhythms of decades or even faster. So we cannot have the models of education of a time where the job market changed maybe in several decades or even not even half a century, more or less the same. So all these things we have to rethink and I hope that we can contribute a little bit to open our spirits in that direction and to reach a knowledge production and adoption that would be helpful in creating globally sustainable conditions for everyone.
Module 5: Institutional Challenges
Saurabh: Professor Werner, now let’s discuss institutional challenges in global sustainability. So what do you think, what can governments and institutions do to create more effective sustainability strategies like initiatives, more effective, effective is the key here.
Benno: I mean if you accept more or less what I just presented, then governments in my experience need to learn a more respectful way to deal with its citizens, to take their views and their problem definitions seriously and not starting from the idea that the ministry knows everything better than any citizen in the country. So that means a more democratic exchange between governors and governed people. I mean we need collaboration and exchange, but if you have in the knowledge adaptation a total top-down logic, this is not really democratic.
Saurabh:That’s true.
Benno: It gives power to a certain group. We saw that with the Covid pandemic, what would happen if natural scientists and people from medicine tried to make social politics. That’s very often not very helpful. I mean of course we depend at all on the knowledge of medical research and so on, but the way it’s applied should also be more open and prepare such scenario how to deal in a situation of emergency and not being lost if there is an emergency. So get it prepared, the whole forms of emergencies that probably will arise in a faster rhythm than we can think of today. We need to also rethink the way they are dealing with problem situations inside their territory and in the global perspective if possible.
Saurabh: Any kind of frameworks you can suggest for that? Like you said, it’s a very important point that you just said that they should not have just stopped an approach or they should not consider themselves as experts who know everything. It’s very important to have citizens involved or rather than having a top-down approach it should be a more inclusive approach. So any frameworks where you would like to suggest that based on your experience?
The idea is to establish a digital platform where people with similar problems from different parts of the world can enter in exchange free of charge, free access.
Benno: Yeah, we are working on that, but the financial means are not allowed to implement it. The idea is to establish a digital platform where people with similar problems from different parts of the world can enter in exchange free of charge, free access. They can discuss things that somebody or the owner of the platform would organize forms of translation that people can… I mean we all have a body and our bodies are not so completely different across the planet as some people pretend they are. So many problems are similar and then we can look for solutions looking at the specific conditions for human bodies and other bodies of living life forms and then discuss solutions and seeing the impact of local solutions for the global level and the other way around and to make people understandable that we more depend on one another than ever before probably in human history because the impact of transformation of nature is so strong in the so-called Anthropocene that you know if somebody has a fire let’s say with a thought of the world population not so long time ago, not such a long time ago, somewhere in the world it didn’t matter really.
Professor Benno Werlen addressing dignitaries.
But if now we have nuclear power stations and other high transformative installations or means of transport the way we are building our houses or and so on this has impact with the growing world population the impact of local action on the global level will grow because the transformations are stronger the number of transformations are and we are very connected now yeah and we have we very and there is no escape there is no planet we can forget about it so we have to take our destiny in our hands and we cannot trust just on governments and we cannot just think it’s sufficient to blame government for not doing enough or doing the wrong things we have to take our self-action and not just blaming others that’s true that’s not sufficient to tell this and that the governments are not doing and therefore I can have an action that is making everybody nervous does that will not be the the solution of our problems I guess.
Saurabh: yeah yeah correct
Benno: at every point on this planet is exposed to global processes
Module 6: Guidance for Future Professionals
Saurabh: In terms of guidance for future sustainability professionals because a lot of our readers and viewers and audience comes from industry where they’re switching into sustainability or they’re planning to build into sustainability and also we have a huge youth audience college students who aspire to do something you know because now they want to get into jobs where they can make some impact and make the world a better place so what advice would you give to the young people who are wanting to switch to career into sustainability especially from people from different academic backgrounds from different academic yeah different academic backgrounds because very diverse people from very diverse sector and they want to have some applied sustainability in their careers they want to have more meaningful careers they want to contribute so they want to understand sustainability so they’re also looking for some opportunities what skills they could learn or what they should do so that they could make some career into sustainability.
Benno: Oh I mean the way I’m thinking this on the background of my experience but it’s also just a selective experience of course even if it’s a long one and not a very narrow one. However, still very selective like all experiences, there are so many platforms around where people can connect with people with similar ideas around the planet. You know I’m too old somehow to tell young people how they should organize their life because life conditions are changing so fast. I would advise them to get in touch with people with similar questions and discuss them and find together solutions adapted to their background and their vision and there are so many people around the planet who have exactly the same ambition as you just mentioned and maybe we should put this kind of platforms together make them visible people like you or me and others and everyone is responsible for his or her life somehow and then we can what we can do is offering them potentials and they have to choose and take responsibility for their for the decision it’s very difficult for people for a person of my age to tell somebody who’s 20 or 21 coming from India or Australia or Latin America what’s the best way of life planning that’s ridiculous I can’t be the advisor for that’s impossible but they could maybe go with people in touch with of their generation and looking for their future because it will be a common destiny of generations also.
So what is suggesting is that they should connect with more people and we could try to organize such an information platform where they can check possibilities and they go in touch there’s an organization called Catalyst 20 30 I think there are 10,000 or 100,000 of young people that are engaging in different projects and they are well organized they have chapters for for Latin America and different parts of Asia and so on and there are many things around that are well done and they’re really really really good and yeah that’s a little bit also the the idea of the inner declaration to bring such people together in that famous in different forms and then with a snowball effect we can maybe in short time produce something very meaningful and encompassing.
Saurabh: One last question, professor. Could you explain the UNESCO resolution on the International Year of Global Understanding (IYGU) and its main goals?
But the idea was to make people aware of the global impact of their own lives—how much they are embedded in global processes and what the global consequences of their ways of living are.
Benno: Oh,that’s exactly what I said before. Looking back, some people felt it should have been phrased differently, but I wanted to keep it open as “global understanding.” However, maybe it would be better to call it “understanding the global condition” because “global understanding” also has the side effect or secondary meaning of being nice to one another, you know, being understanding. But the idea was to make people aware of the global impact of their own lives—how much they are embedded in global processes and what the global consequences of their ways of living are. We wanted to produce seven booklets as an introduction, stimulating this kind of thinking, but we only managed to produce three. One is about eating, drinking, and surviving—the way nutrition is organized has an impact on many people, and so on, so that’s very well done. The other one is about working, housing, and urbanization, so that the way we produce has an impact on the way we live and organize spatially, and so on. The last one was about communicating and interacting on a global scale. The others haven’t been produced because the time was too short and the money was too limited, so we were not able to replace certain people on the editorial board of different booklets. But maybe we should. I mean, the idea is ongoing, but it’s rather loosely organized at the moment. The Jena Declaration is somehow the follow-up to the International Year of Global Understanding, but the resolution—you can find it in the UNESCO documents—focuses on the integration of the sciences to engage together in global solutions for global problems. One outcome is the International Science Council, where the social sciences and the natural sciences have come together as one council, and the founding members of this council were all involved in the International Year of Global Understanding, like Kai Daigman and Gordon McVeigh, and so on. So this was one of the outcomes, continuing, you know, in that spirit. The idea, as I said, is to understand the living conditions and to see that cultural and social backgrounds shape ways of living. Natural scientists shouldn’t forget that there is always a cultural background; you can’t just have a law aligned with social measurements and expect everyone to follow it. That will never work, so you have to be respectful in dealing with these issues. In fact, the idea is also to produce a new geographical vision of the world because our lives have changed. The world is no longer as it was when geography was established as a discipline of colonial powers, forging nationalism and serving as a national institution in schools. We need to have another geographical representation of the world that better fits the way we live in modern times now, you know. And I think that’s important.
Saurabh: that’s a very interesting perspective yeah very fresh perspective
Professor Werlen it has been really amazing to know about your UNESCO journey and you know declaration how the entire thing has evolved starting right from the internship days in africa till where you are today and it it’s really amazing work it’s a very big step that you have taken working with you know declaration and we would earth 5r would like to encourage our committee members to go and look it up and sign it we’ll make it available on our website in this blog and our our podcast as well uh and thank you so much it was we learned a lot today about the art that goes behind sustainability apart from science that we learned today especially about the geography uh for the audience if you’re looking to get involved in in earth 5r programs you want to change the way your surroundings are and you want to participate in any kind of sustainability actions go ahead and download earth fiber app and pick your local area and take some action and together as we’re discussing podcasts today there is a lot of opportunity to change things together thank you very much thanks a lot everyone
-Reported by Samriddhi
Earth5R is a UNESCO-recognized global environmental organization that is helping global communities and businesses transition towards a green economy. This is achieved through Earth5R’s Google award-winning app and state-of-the-art learning management system.
The Earth5R app acts as a catalyst for community-driven environmental action, enabling individuals to make a tangible impact.It addresses the issue of climate inaction by providing a platform for individuals to participate actively in environmental conservation and sustainability practices. By connecting users worldwide, the Earth5R app fosters a global community of environmental advocates.
Earth5R provides various opportunities for students and individuals to prepare them for the new age climate economy through hands-on courses which dive into essential topics such as urban sustainability, deforestation, circular economy, sustainable product design, life cycle assessments, green energy, and more
