Sustainable Island Futures - University of Aruba

The Sustainable Island Futures Symposium was co-hosted by SISSTEM at the University of Aruba, the Islands section of the International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE), & the Metabolism of Islands (MoI) on the 10th of May 2023.

Small island states are characterized by a strong dependency on external resources to meet their basic needs which highly contributes to the vulnerability of these territories. The approaches to increase resource security and self-reliance in small island states need to be carefully redesigned considering context-specific challenges and opportunities. At the same time, in order to achieve sustainability and build system resilience, holistic approaches need to be favored over narrow agendas. Several research collaborations are ongoing to address these challenges, such as the Sustainable Island Solutions through Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (SISSTEM) program at the University of Aruba, and the Metabolism of Islands (MoI) research program. These bring together researchers from a dozen universities that are concerned about sustainable futures for small islands throughout the world. This multidisciplinary symposium aims to bring together emerging scholars to exchange ideas and approaches for a sustainability transformation in small island states and to foster interdisciplinary and interinstitutional collaboration.

The topics presented were: "Social metabolism in the Faroe Islands and the cultural logics that organize it – implications for sustainability and resilience.", "Multi-Hazard Risk Assessment of Small Islands Developing States: A case study of Labasa, Vanualevu, Fiji", "Sustainable Water Reuse in Gozo, Malta: Assessing Farmers' Access to reused water.", "A Political-Industrial ecology of houses and mining infrastructures in Svalbard." and "Circularizing Organic Waste of SIDS to Enhance the Global Circular Economy.". 

The symposium is a recurring event.