Sustainable Island Futures, June 2021

A symposium co-hosted by SISSTEM, University of Aruba (http://www.ua.aw/sisstem/) & the Metabolism of Islands (MoI), will take place on 10 June 2021. Small island states are characterized by a strong dependency on external resources to meet their basic needs which highly contributes to the vulnerability of these territories. The approaches to increase resource security and self-reliance in small island states need to be carefully redesigned considering context-specific challenges and opportunities. At the same time, in order to achieve sustainability and build system resilience, holistic approaches need to be favored over narrow agendas. Several research collaborations are ongoing to address these challenges, such as the Sustainable Island Solutions through Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (SISSTEM) program at the University of Aruba and the Metabolism of Islands (MoI) research program. These bring together researchers from a dozen universities that are concerned about sustainable futures for small islands throughout the world. This multidisciplinary symposium aims to bring together researchers to exchange ideas and approaches for a sustainability transformation in small island states and to foster interdisciplinary and interinstitutional collaboration.

We invite PhD-candidates and graduate students to submit proposals for this online event. Proposals can center on research design, contextualization of methodologies, theoretical frameworks or research outcomes on resource circularity, island metabolism, islandness or on threats and opportunities that hinder or further sustainable development and resilience of small island states with regards to food security, food production, food chains, nutrition, and biomass flows.