You are hereby cordially invited to the third Stellenbosch Forum lecture of the year.

The Stellenbosch Forum lecture series was started in 1990 and provides regular opportunities to staff and students at SU, as well as interested people from the public, to learn more about the relevant, world-class research that is being done at SU. Researchers are requested to present their academic research topics in such a way that they are understandable for non-experts in the field, and these lectures therefore provide the ideal opportunity for critical debate and interesting discussions across disciplinary boundaries.

At this event, Prof Reinette (Oonsie) Biggs,  DST/NRF South African Research Chair (SARChI): Social-Ecological Systems & Resilience at the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition (CST) at Stellenbosch University, will present a lecture with the title:

Seeds of Good Anthropocenes: Fostering transitions to resilient and sustainable futures

Date:      Wednesday, 5 September 2018

Time:     13:00 – 14:00

Venue:   Stellenbosch University Library

              Auditorium

More about the lecture

We live in the Anthropocene, a new geological era where human activities are profoundly changing the functioning of the Earth. This new era poses unprecedented challenges to human society, including the increasing scale, speed and connectivity of human activities and the potential for planetary tipping points. At the same time, a variety of social innovations, technological progress and human development are opening up exciting opportunities for addressing these challenges. The "Seeds of Good Anthropocenes" project (https://goodanthropocenes.net), a Future Earth global change research initiative, aims to solicit, explore, and develop a suite of provocative alternative visions for “Good Anthropocenes" – positive futures that are socially and ecologically desirable, just, resilient and sustainable, and which go beyond the conventional sustainable development discourse. Psychological and sociological research suggests that inspirational visions can be key components of transformations to sustainability, as they can help shape the future by changing how people understand the world and what they expect from it. The project involves transdisciplinary workshops to collect a wide variety of “seeds" - real initiatives that demonstrate one or more elements of a positive future that might contribute to creating a good Anthropocene in different communities and places around the world. Using these seeds, we developed an innovative new approach for building provocative positive future visions through a bottom-up approach that draws on methods from futures thinking. This presentation gives an overview of the project, highlighting the findings for Southern Africa. Through this collaborative initiative we aim to counterbalance prevailing dystopic visions that may be inhibiting our collective ability to transition onto a positive trajectory for the Earth and humanity, and inform actions that have the potential to leverage deep systemic change.