Prof Jeffrey Sachs, American economist, academic, public policy analyst and former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, has identified eight Grand Challenges for our time[1]:
- Any successful city needs to be a skilled and learning environment.
- “E-everything“: we need high-quality fibre/wireless for all services, payments, governance, voting, etc.
- “Clean up after ourselves“: we need to refuse, reduce, re-use, recycle
- We need dense, mixed, walkable cities
- All cities need to reach Zero Carbon and be electric by end of C21
- We need a share economy: “Diplomats uptown and markets downtown need to collaborate” to generate an innovative, socially-just economy
- We need resilient infrastructure for climate change. Cities need to strive towards UN Sustainable Development Goals
Cities need to strive towards UN Sustainable Development Goals
[1] Comments made at the UN 71st General Assembly in New York, September 2016
How I can help you to get there
- By helping you to engage communities, governments, researchers” to “By supporting you to engage communities, governments, researchers.
- I collaborate with busy planners, councillors and policymakers develop rigorous, useful information that is grounded in the contributions and expertise of communities and local partners.
- I help to generate collective impact to address complex social issues. I do this by building collaboration across sectors and groups who share a common interest
- I build Partnerships that generate useful knowledge, action and policy. These partnerships:
- integrate research, learning and practice
- are community-engaged: involving citizens, policy makers, practitioners and knowledge brokers
- are policy-relevant
- use research methods relevant to policy makers
- are interdisciplinary
- are linked to active dissemination, and
- are linked to action
