Plenary Speakers

The International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability will feature plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field, as well as numerous parallel presentations by researchers and practitioners.

Garden Conversation Sessions

Plenary Speakers will make formal 30-minute presentations. They will also participate in 60-minute Garden Conversations – unstructured sessions that allow delegates a chance to meet the speakers and talk with them informally about the issues arising from their presentation.

Please return to this page for regular updates.

The Speakers

Hideyuki Doi

Hideyuki Doi is currently working as Tenure-track lecturer in Institute for Sustainable Sciences and Development (ISSD) at Hiroshima University, Japan. His current interests are general ecology and sustainability of ecosystems. His current works in ISSD have focused on ecological sustainability under environmental changes, such as eutrophication, climate change and radiation fallout. For the ongoing projects in ISSD, he is surveying natural aquatic fields to monitor sustainability of ecosystems, and testing the ecological hypotheses to predict sustainability of ecosystem and ecological communities using the microcosm experiment series. More recently, with concerning radiation fallout effect on ecosystems, his group established the models to predict the long-term fate of radioactive cesium concentration in freshwater fish species using ecological/biological traits of fish species. He will address the ecological view points for considering sustainability of ecosystems and human lives in changing world.

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Rohit Jigyasu

Rohit Jigyasu is a conservation architect and risk management scientific expert from India, currently working as UNESCO Chair and Professor at the Research Centre for Disaster Mitigation of Urban Cultural Heritage at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. He is a Senior Advisor to the Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS). Rohit is President of ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Risk Preparedness (ICORP), Paris. Rohit’s work has focussed on long term sustainability of cultural heritage through disaster risk reduction. He has extensive experience of working on applied projects and capacity building in countries of both North and South. 2011 has witnessed an unrelenting series of disasters of all kinds. Professor Jigyasu addresses the key concerns of disaster preparedness and response taking of cognisance of the imperatives of sustainability of cultural localities and communities.

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Junko Edahiro

Junko Edahiro, Chief Executive, Japan for Sustainability; President, Institute for Studies in Happiness, Economy and Society; Environmental journalist, translator, President of e’s Inc.; Chairperson of Change Agent Inc.; member of Mid- and Long-term Roadmap Subcommittee of the Global Environmental Committee (under Central Environmental Council, Japan Ministry of the Environment); Chairperson of Communication Marketing Working Group, visiting researcher for Research into Artifacts at the Center for Engineering (RACE) at the University of Tokyo; initiator of the Candle Night campaign.

Junko Edahiro obtained a Master’s degree in Educational Psychology from The University of Tokyo. Still active today as an environmental journalist, Edahiro also runs two companies. She is committed to communication and networking through lecturing, publishing, and translating on the environment, all with the aim of causing behavioral change among people and building effective systems for a sustainable society. To comprehensively study the relationship among happiness, economy, and society and work on these themes, she has held workshops on happiness and sustainability as well as world trends on growth, where she introduces Bhutan’s use of the Gross National Happiness (GNH) indicator, as well as “de-growth” research and case studies in Europe. Her published translations include “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update,” and an anthology of the “Resurgence” magazine. Her publications include “Beyond ‘Eco’ – How to Make a Happy Future,” “A Way Out of Energy Crisis,” and “How to Fix the Earth.”

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