December 5, 2023 (Tuesday, 10:00-11:00 AM JST)
About the Webinar
In today’s world, critical systems such as water, energy, and food are deeply interconnected, making the understanding of resilience and dependency risk crucial. Such systems are susceptible to various shocks, including climate change, conflicts, and natural disasters. This presentation will showcase the application of systems thinking to quantify risk and resilience in resource trade networks. It will particularly employ methodologies from information theory and ecological food webs to assess resilience and dependencies. Our discussion will focus on key concepts like redundancy, diversity, modularity, and point-wise mutual information (PMI), exploring their theoretical and practical implications with real-world examples. Additionally, this presentation will emphasize that resilience benefits are non-excludable and non-rivalrous, leading to positive externalities crucial for sustainable development and peace in a globally interconnected world.
About the Speaker
Dr. Ali Kharrazi is a Senior Research Scholar at the Systemic Risk and Resilience (SYRR) Research Group of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and also serves as a visiting Associate Professor at the Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS) of Hiroshima University. His overarching research interest concerns the sustainability challenges of coupled economic-environmental systems, and more specifically, the development of models and metrics that can evaluate the resilience of critical global resource networks to shocks and disturbances. Ali has lectured on human-environmental systems, corporate sustainability, and sustainable science at The University of Tokyo and Akita International University in Japan. He holds numerous editorial board positions in sustainability-focused journals and is the editor-in-chief of Current Research in Environmental Sustainability. He has received prestigious competitive research funding, most notably from the Belmont Forum, Horizon Europe, and the Marie Curie Fellowship. In addition to his roles in academia, Ali engages the science-policy interface previously as a consultant to UN agencies on food and resource trade networks and currently as a lead author of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Nexus Assessment Report.
About the NERPS Webinar Series
The Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS) at Hiroshima University in Japan is hosting a series of webinars on the relationship between peace and sustainability in the context of environmental, socio-political, economic, and technological transformations. This series is situated within the urgent need to deal with the implications of global change, including the COVID-19 pandemic, for peace and sustainability. The webinar sessions serve as a platform for rethinking and updating the current discourse on peace and sustainability amidst these global challenges and transformations. Leading experts will discuss the role of resources, digital technologies, migration, governance, and education in peacebuilding, conflict mitigation, humanitarian aid, and capacity-building, among other components that contribute to the achievement of the Sustainability Development Goals, particularly that of Goal 16 on Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions. Check out our previous webinars here.
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