UN SDSN National Workshop

Currently, most of citizens live in the city. More than 3.5 million people occupy only 2% of the earth’s land, but account for 60 – 80% of energy consumption and 75% of carbon emissions. The number of population in urban ares will rapidly increase by almost 60% in 2030. Along with global trends, urbanization in Indonesia rose slightly from 42% in 2000 to 52% in 2013 which created challenges such as low funding to ensure basic public services, energy efficiency, pollution, transportation, water availability, food security, and waste management. There are three basic needs of sustainability on urban development in island and coastal environment that will be discussed in SDSN National Meeting 2015: clean water, food security, and waste management. Clean water is a vital needs of living. However, clean water still become expensive natural resource in some island and coastal environment. 

UN SDSN National Workshop – Solution Initiatives for Urban Development in Island and Coastal Environment: Water, Food Security, and Waste Management 

Millions of people die each year, most of them children, from largely preventable diseases caused by a lack of access to clean water and proper sanitation. As one of the most populous country in the world, citizen of Indonesia face the challenge of food security. In islands and coastal area, this issue has been a major problems since the land limitation, clean water availability, and less human resource. Furthermore, climate change will make it worse through all component of food systems, as changing on rainfall patterns, rising temperature, more pests attack, loss of pollinators, and climate uncertainty. Waste problem not only affected due to climate change but also created environmental and health concerns related to air pollution such as NO_x, SO₂, dioxin, and fine particles. If not handled properly, the cost of waste management will be significantly higher in the future. National Sustainable Development Solution Network (SDSN) purposed to mobilize universities, research centers, civil society organizations, business, another knowledge centers around practical problem solving for sustainable development. The outcome of the meeting will be presented on SDSN Regional Meeting 2015 and hopefully could be implemented in Indonesia. Thus, the workshop has the following aims:

• To identify and discuss challenges for achieving sustainable island and coastal.
• To discuss practical sustainable solutions for sustainable island and coastal.
• To create manuals for sustainable island and coastal.
• To empower Indonesian youth to create sustainable development solutions.

The workshop was organized by Research Center for Climate Change – Universitas Indonesia (RCCC-UI), United in Diversity forum (UID), and Indonesian Academics of Science (AIPI). The workshop was held for two days and carried out in The Margo Hotel, Depok. The setup of the workshop was that the first day, there were series of presentations from keynote speakers and invited speakers to present problems, challenges, and potential best practices from islands and coastal cities in water, food, and waste. Invited speakers were major or representative from regents in Indonesia. Following presentations, focused group discussion (FGD) were conducted where the participants were divided into two groups: coastal and islands. The second day, FGD session was continued. Prior to FGD, a session was dedicated for UN SDSN Youth Network. The workshop was closed with closing speech from Jatna Supriatna, Ph.D. as Chairman of RCCC-UI and official launching of UN SDSN Youth Network which is dedicated to improve young generation participation in finding solutions for sustainable development.