February 2, 2024 (Friday), 16:30-18:00 PM JST
IDEC Large Conference Room
About the Lecture
The concept of planetary boundaries encompasses nine processes that control the Earth system’s stability and resilience. Six out of the nine boundaries have been acknowledged to have been crossed, potentially translating into critical environmental changes that endanger the way of life as we know it. As such, the call for action prioritizes understanding what sustainability means in a finite global system. There is a need to clarify the impacts and influence of the combined and diverse global supply chain sectors and cross-sector interactions that result in natural resource scarcity at a global scale. Flows of materials and energy occur across organizational, administrative, and geographical boundaries, triggering environmental problem displacement, transfer of harmful practices, governance issues, and, in some cases, transnational conflicts.
This lecture will introduce a discussion on the identification and quantification of environmental impacts of global systems and processes, i.e., supply chains and trade from the production and consumption perspectives, their contribution to intensifying natural resource demand, and the crossing of the national and regional scale boundaries. Based on the global trade network analysis and life cycle assessment, examples from global food systems and secondary materials (‘waste’) are drawn to map global exchanges, and to highlight potential environmental justice matters.
About the Speaker
Dr. Letícia Sarmento dos Muchangos is an environmental engineer and sustainability researcher. She focuses on developing integrated waste management systems in low-income contexts, considering policy, technical and stakeholder aspects, particularly interested in the predominant final disposal challenge – waste open dumping and burning. Connected with that, she also explores the positioning, perspectives, and narratives of the Global South in the movement towards the implementation of the Circular Economy.
Currently, she is a project assistant professor at the Center for Global Commons (CGC), Institute for Future Initiatives (IFI), University of Tokyo, as a contributor to the Sustainable Food Systems Transformation project, conducting environmental impact assessments of key food commodities, via the Life Cycle Analysis methodology.
Dr. Letícia Sarmento dos Muchangos is a Mozambican-trained civil engineer specialized in environmental engineering from Chongqing University in PR China for a master’s and Osaka University in Japan for a doctorate. She was a postdoctoral fellow from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) at Keio University and the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS). She also worked at IFI as a project researcher and as an assistant professor at Osaka University.
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