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]:

1. Any successful city needs to be a skilled and learning environment.
2. “E-everything“: we need high-quality fibre/wireless for all services, payments, governance, voting, etc.
3. “Clean up after ourselves“: we need to refuse, reduce, re-use, recycle
4. We need dense, mixed, walkable cities
5. All cities need to reach Zero Carbon and be electric by end of C21
6. We need a share economy: “Diplomats uptown and markets downtown need to collaborate” to generate an innovative, socially-just economy
7. 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