The BUP Symposium 2023 was organized as a two-day long online event.

Conference reports Sustainable Development in the Baltic Sea Region

On November 7-8, 2023, Baltic University Programme organized the BUP Symposium, an annual online event to discuss different aspects of ongoing research on sustainable development in the Baltic Sea region.

Published on balticworlds.com on November 8, 2023

On 7-8 November 7-8, 2023, Baltic University Programme organized the BUP Symposium, an annual online event to discuss different aspects of ongoing research on sustainable development in the Baltic Sea region. The event opened with a welcome address by Hele Kiimann of the BUP International Board (Uppsala University, Sweden), followed by a presentation of the recently published book Re-thinking the Baltic Sea Region: Trends and Challenges (Baltic University Programme 2023) by Victor Shadurski (formerly Belarusian State University, Belarus).

The BUP Symposium 2023 was organized as a two-day long online event.

BUP organizes this and other events following a thematic structure, involving ten themes, corresponding to the Sustainable Development Goals indicated by the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: (1) Climate Change (2) Energy Systems (3) Sustainable Societies (4) Sustainable Water Resources (5) Urban-Rural Development (6) Sustainable Mobility (7) Circular Economy (8) Sustainable Tourism (9) Education for Sustainable Development and (10) Sustainable Food Systems. For the online symposium, this thematic structure was transformed into a number of working sessions, based on submitted papers and accepted presentations.

To illustrate, the 2023 Symposium included Kęstutis Zaleckis (Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania) who did a presentation on city planning, comparing four cities: Vilnius, Kaunas, Thessaloniki and Detroit. Cities are both a cause and a place to seek solutions to the climate change threat. Jakub Wydra (Jagiellonian University, Poland) did a presentation on actors and stakeholders influencing the process of urban climate adaptation, and Liliia Hrytsai (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Poland) compared urban strategies for increased sustainability in Stockholm and Gdansk. Anna Piętka (SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Poland) did a presentation on housing policies in Poland, a crucial element of urban and rural development.

Other presentations focused on gender equality issues, like Marzena Fryczyńska (SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Poland), who presented her research on sustainable work quality for retired women. Gender inequality in the public pension system and cultural norms make women withdraw from the labor market much earlier than men, which typically leads to women having lower pension benefits and thus becoming more vulnerable to poverty in old age than men. In a country like Poland this is particularly important, since the statutory retirement age for women is lower than for men. Živilė Stankevičiūtė (Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania) did as presentation on employee resilience. This novel concept has gained popularity recently, due to COVID-19 and war. The ability to withstand such challenges in the future is crucial not only to different societies, but also to organisations and enterprises.

Sustainable tourism was covered by Sanna-Mari Rennfors (Satakunta University of Applied Sciences, Finland), who did a presentation on “environmental management skills”, and by Annette Oxenswärdh (Uppsala University, Campus Gotland, Sweden) in a presentation on sustainability work of hotels in Europe. You get the picture; the symposium included a wide variety of topics and research disciplines.

Pontus Ambros (Baltic University Programme) introduced the second day of the event, which started with a presentation by Carsten Hille and Markus Vossel (Technical University of Applied Sciences in Wildau, Germany) on knowledge and technology transfer. Among other things, they emphasized the need for universities to interact not only with companies, but with all kinds of stakeholders.

Like the first day of the symposium, the second day included a lot of presentations and discussions. Some presentations were rather specific, like Viktoriia Havryliak (Lviv Polytechnic National University, Ukraine) who talked about the application of biopolymers for creation of biomaterials, or Anna Buncler (University of Warsaw, Poland) who talked about concious food choices towards sustainability; others were more general, like Magdalena Kubal-Czerwińska (Jagiellonian University, Poland) who talked about the work with starting up an international PhD network, emphasizing the need for gender balance and interdisciplinary cooperation.

Also, the second day focused on future research collaborations. A number of projects ideas were presented, as an opportunity to create cross-national and multidisciplinary cooperation in the region. After the event, a book of abstracts will be published.

 

Note: The BUP publication mentioned in the introduction can be download for free here:>>

 

 

Joakim Ekman