Expert Session – Young Person’s Guide to Systems Change: Leading Wellbeing for a Healthy Planet

This is now a Past Event,

Event Proceedings:

Event Title: Expert Session – Young Person’s Guide to Systems Change: Leading Wellbeing for a Healthy Planet

Date: December 5, 2024
Time: 5:00 PM to 7:30 PM CET
Venue: Virtual Platform – Zoom

Introduction to the Event

The global economy is undergoing rapid shifts driven by technological advancements, environmental challenges, and evolving societal needs. As economies face growing pressures to become more sustainable and equitable, there is a pressing need to explore transformational economics—a multidisciplinary field focused on redefining economic systems to prioritize sustainability, social equity, and long-term resilience. Engaging experts and students in this discussion can catalyze innovative thinking and solutions.

Objectives

The primary objective of this session is to create a participatory platform where students can:
• Interact with leading experts in transformational economics and learn about current trends.
• Explore practical solutions for building sustainable economic systems.

The session aims to foster active engagement, discussions, and collaboration among participants, empowering students to contribute to economic transformations in fields such as health, environment, agriculture, and behavioral economics.

Target Audience:

• Undergraduate and graduate students with an interest in economics, sustainability, public policy, environmental studies, and related disciplines.
• Faculty members and researchers looking to explore interdisciplinary approaches to economics.
• Industry professionals interested in sustainable development and economic reforms.

DETAILS OF THE HOSTS 
Dr. Sonal Katyal – Moderator

DETAILS OF THE SESSION

1. Dr. Sonal Katyal formally gave a warm welcome to the participants, guests, and attendees of the session,  the path towards the conference took the route of shedding some light on the importance of the session for its participants and the attendees.

2. Dr. Sonal Katal introduced Ms Nolita Mvunelo, highlighting her background in building eco systems and approaches to systems transformations

3. Nolita Introduced the Young Person’s Guide to Systems Change – what is the role of young people in creating well-being on a healthy planet and she explored different perspectives in systems thinking and the opportunities for long-lasting transformation through examples and interactive dialogues.

4. She discussed about development index which is a measuring of well-being from zero to one an ecological footprint in terms of number of earths, meaning how many earths would it take for everyone in the world to meet the the type of development standard or development framework that is embodied in that country. Africa for the most part is sitting pretty low on the development spectrum because high development is at around 0.7, very high development is from 0.8 onwards so most African countries are actually on the other side of high development, and also when it comes to number of earths many African countries are below, meaning they are sustainable per se.

5. She talked about creating thriving and healthy environment and some countries are better than others doesn’t quite make sense so already by embracing systems thinking you can then start to understand the world from the perspective of we all have something to learn and about other people catching up from others but very few people actually know what to do and in the center here that not to say that these are the people that know what to do but the people who are operating within what the window that actually works is the Philippines Jamaica Ecuador Cuba Sri Lanka not necessarily the places  we think about which economic models make sense or work not

6. She also said that the gap between what we know and what we do and how we understand the consequences of our actions can sometimes manifest as systemic exclusion because how this shows up, we as Humanity have not developed a way to systematically include younger people in the work of defining and building a better future.

7. She also discussed various examples and discussed the work of Club of Rome.

 PICTURES FROM SESSION 

Q& A
Q&A was facilitated by Dr Sonal Katyal and was very interactive as participants asked questions to the expert.

CONCLUSION
The session was concluded by Dr Sonal Katyal by thanking the speaker and participants.