ESIC’S – 5th Edition 2024-2025

ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY AND INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION SEMINARS

Over the last decades, the rapid effects of global change, mostly related to population growth, hectic production systems, and environmental and climate variations, have shown the paramount importance of environmental sustainability for the livelihoods of Earth population and should be managed as a cross-cutting priority. Particular attention should be paid to low-income contexts, where a variety of imbalance and vulnerability factors might threaten or irreversibly affect the integrity of the last remaining near-natural ecosystems.

In this framework, the UNESCO Chair in Engineering for Human and Sustainable Development launches the fifth edition of ESIC’s, a cycle of Environmental Sustainability and International Cooperation webinars aimed at exploring, together with actors of international cooperation and researchers, key environmental challenges of international interest and possible ways forward, drawing from the state of science and from the experience of local contexts. In each webinar, a specific topic will be interactively discussed. In this fifth edition, we will tackle further challenges, such as Nature-based Solutions for sustainable cities, combating pollution in agriculture, water and sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa, water quality assessment in suburban settlement and earth observation and monitoring from space, with with international speakers from academia, cooperation agencies, companies and NGOs. 

To effectively deal with climate change and the environmental crisis, ESIC’s places a high value on training a new generation of environmental engineers to cope with complex technical and non-technical problems and to provide innovative and sustainable solutions in the context of international cooperation, with a project-oriented and hands-on approach, fostering transdisciplinary knowledge, cutting-edge research and excellence in teaching.

Participants and registration

ESIC’s webinars are open to researchers and students, as well as practitioners of international cooperation, professionals and voluntary operators, belonging to profit and non-profit organizations, national and international institutions, networks, and professional associations.

Pre-registration for DICAM-Unitrento students at this link: 

https://webapps.unitn.it/PrenotazioniEventi/it/Web/DatiOrigine/687

Pre-registration for anyone else at this link: https://forms.gle/EFXtrvRWaj7okG5n9

Organizing committee

• Guido Zolezzi, Full Professor
• Marco Toffolon, Full Professor
• Marco Bezzi, Teaching Fellow, Engineer 
• Massimo Zortea, Teaching Fellow, Lawyer
• Marta Crivellaro, Post-doc Research Fellow
• Ada Castellucci, Chiara Braucher, Flamur Bajrami, Susanna Ottaviani, PhD students
• Nicola D’Alberton, Anisa Bica, Mireille Galli, Research Fellows

Teaching method

A reminder email will be sent to all registered students and interested externals will be sent regularly.

A dedicated online training platform is accessible here, where you can find the Zoom webinar link, together with speakers’ presentations and additional material that will be progressively uploaded. 

The online web platform is accessible at this LINK

(registration key: ESIC’s2025)

Each webinar will last 2 academic hours (1 hour and 30 minutes) in English. Two invited talks will take place in the first part, followed by an inclusive discussion and question/answer session.

Final test

DICAM-UNITRENTO students who attend at least 80% of the seminars (4 over 5 seminars) IN PRESENCE and pass the final test will be awarded 1 credit type F. 

Students from other departments of UNITRENTO will have to ask their department secretaries about credit recognition.

The final test consists of a short (5-minute) oral presentation on a date to be fixed in the first half of June 2025. Each student will be asked to identify, describe, and discuss a dual challenge, i.e., which includes both the management/implementation and the technical/scientific levels. The identified challenge has to be chosen among those that emerged across multiple (at least 2) webinars. The presentation must also refer to at least two of the papers/documents made available in the DOL platform and outline possible ways forward to the discussed challenges. The presentation will be in English.

Certificate of Attendance

At the end of the cycle of webinars, participants who are not enrolled in UNITRENTO or who have not included the cycle of seminars in their study plan, can be issued a certificate of attendance in case they explicitly request it, provided they have attended at least 80% of the webinar hours (4 over 5 seminars). 

For further details about the series of webinars and how to participate, please contact the following addresses:

marta.crivellaro@unitn.it

susanna.ottaviani@unitn.it

Calendar