ISCN Mission
The mission of the ISCN is to provide an international forum to support higher education institutions in the exchange of information, ideas, and best practices for achieving sustainable campus operations and integrating sustainability in research and teaching.
Conference Concept and Overview
The 2023 conference will explore and reflect on the role that universities have played and can play to foster resilience within their campuses and communities, but also in their wider socio-ecological contexts.
Communities, institutions, and ecosystems are facing critical and urgent challenges because of the devastating environmental changes the world is experiencing. These challenges and threats are also related to increasing poverty, inequality, and political instability in many regions of the world. From a comprehensive perspective, resilience refers to the capacities of socio-ecological systems to address these challenges and reduce the levels of vulnerability in individuals, societies, and ecosystems.
Resilience building in higher education institutions, an urgent need in all regions around the world, is even more pressing in the developing world, where processes of environmental deterioration tend to be more extreme and where universities are often some of the most trustable and ecologically and socially committed institutions.
The conference will aim to discuss and share experiences on the strategies that institutions can implement to build resilience, considering the substantive functions of universities in teaching, research, campus management, and community engagement.