Frontiers Planet Prize champion, Professor Jason Rohr, delivers keynote speech at NSS inaugural event
September saw the National Sustainability Society’s (NSS) inaugural conference take place at The University of Washington, Seattle. With over 600 participants, the event brought together academics, students, and practitioners from the private, public, and nonprofit sectors across the field of sustainability.
The society’s mission is simple: to build an organization for shared, integrated, and globally flourishing professional practice and research for sustainability. By focusing on dialog and community building they aim to support professional and scholarly activities that will drive sustainable transformations across sectors.
Led by interim president Christopher Boone from the School of Sustainability, University of Arizona, and a key member of the Frontiers Planet Prize, the conference’s focus was sustainability scholarship and practice with three themes — sustainability innovation, closing the implementation gap, and workforce development — forming the basis of discussions.
Alongside three plenary keynote speeches that addressed the implications of artificial intelligence including intelligence in sustainability, climate change and the role of social justice in sustainability, there were 28 additional panels designed to engage cross-sectoral conversations on key sustainability topics. This was then supported with 15-minute presentations that were organized into 44 oral sessions and symposia, spark sessions and flash talks, each designed to engage discussions, encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, and explore innovative approaches to sustainability issues.
The event has secured the NSS as a key player when it comes to fostering interdisciplinarity connections between industry and academia and the initial feedback from participants already suggests that the program facilitated strong, positive relationships between the two.
To reiterate their commitment to creating a sustainable future for everyone, the conference finished with a plenary prize session that included keynote talks from the 2024 National Sustainability Society Annual Achievement Award Winner, Minnesota’s Climate-Smart Municipalities Program and Frontiers Planet Prize International Champion, Professor Jason Rohr.
The importance of interconnectedness was at the heart of Professor Rohr’s speech and forms the basis of his Frontiers Planet Prize winning research, which explores schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease transmitted through contact with contaminated freshwater. In his research, Professor Rohr highlights the need to reimagine poverty, health, and environmental issues as intersections rather than separate issues.
During his keynote, Professor Rohr once again reiterated this point and urgently called for a systems-based, interdisciplinary approach to tackle interconnected challenges, especially for marginalized communities. It’s this approach which will help achieve the UNs SDGs which Professor Rohr notes are too often researched in isolation yet intersect with one another often.
To illustrate his point, Professor Rohr went on to explain how in Senegal’s Sagal River Basin him and his team removed an invasive vegetation which was then repurposed as compost, livestock feed, and for biofuel production. In a randomized controlled trial in 16 villages, the results showed that removing this vegetation led to a 103-fold reduction in snails (which are the primary carriers of the parasite larvae that cause schistosomiasis), improved water access, and significantly increased crop yields when biomass was composted. Not only this, but the intervention proved to be incredibly cost-effective, with a nine-fold return on investment and the potential for scaling using remote sensing to target disease hotspots.
Looking ahead to the future, Professor Rohr hopes to test the approach in other African regions where schistosomiasis is prevalent and provide training to communities to sustain this initiative, resulting in a long-term scalable solution that align with multiple SDGs. Alongside this and with support from the Frontiers Planet Prize, the team also plans to refine the remote sensing element of the initiative and expand this approach to inspire further cross-disciplinary solutions for global health and environmental challenges that benefit all.
As the NSS gives researchers like Professor Rohr the chance to disseminate their work to a wider audience, The Frontiers Planet Prize continues to mobilize the scientific community and crowdsource impactful and transformational research, leading to a global green renaissance where both people and the planet can thrive. Together, both parties aim to inspire and facilitate impactful conversations that have the power to change the world.
About the Frontiers Planet Prize
The Frontiers Planet Prize is a global competition for scientists and research institutions to propose solutions to help the planet remain within the safe operating space of any one or more of the nine planetary boundaries. It was created by the Frontiers Research Foundation on Earth Day 2022 to mobilize the global scientific community, make it complete at the highest level of excellence, and contribute to the acceleration of concrete solutions to the challenges defined by the planetary boundaries. To date, it has drawn together hundreds of scientists, 20 national academies of science, 475 leading universities and research institutions to compete for three prizes of 1M Swiss francs each as adjudicated by a Jury of 100 leading sustainability scientists.
About the Frontiers Research Foundation
The Frontiers Research Foundation is a not-for-profit organization based in Switzerland, which was founded by Kamila and Henry Markram, neuroscientists from the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (EPFL). It raises funds to support programs that accelerate scientific solutions for healthy lives on a healthy planet.
