Maritime and coastal engineering for nature conservation and climate change mitigation

Over the last decades, the rapid effects of global change, mostly related to population growth, hectic production systems, and environmental and climate variations, have shown the paramount importance of environmental sustainability for the livelihoods of Earth's population and should be managed as a cross-cutting priority. Particular attention should be paid to low-income contexts, where a variety of imbalance and vulnerability factors might threaten or irreversibly affect the
integrity of the last remaining near-natural ecosystems.

In this framework, the UNESCO Chair in Engineering for Human and Sustainable Development launches the fourth edition of ESIC’s, a cycle of Environmental Sustainability and International Cooperation webinars aimed at exploring, together with actors of international cooperation and researchers, key environmental challenges of international interest and possible ways forward, drawing from the state of science and the experience of local contexts. In each webinar, a specific topic will be interactively discussed. In this fourth edition, we will tackle further challenges, such as Circular Economy applied to RAEE, critical mapping, maritime engineering for conservation and mitigation, innovative agriculture in international cooperation contexts, and nature-based solutions among others, with international speakers from academia, cooperation agencies, companies and NGOs.

To effectively deal with climate change and the environmental crisis, ESI’sC places a high value on training a new generation of environmental engineers to cope with complex technical and non-technical problems and to provide innovative and sustainable solutions in the context of
international cooperation, with a project-oriented and hands-on approach, fostering transdisciplinary knowledge, cutting-edge research and excellence in teaching.

Invited Speakers

Francesco De Leo* and Giovanni Besio (University of Genoa)

Participants and registration

ESIC’s webinars are open to researchers and students, as well as practitioners of international cooperation, professionals and voluntary operators, belonging to profit and non-profit organizations, national and international institutions, networks, and professional associations.

Click here for pre-registration for DICAM-Unitrento students

Click here for the pre-registration for anyone else

Teaching method

A reminder email will be sent to all registered students and interested externals will be sent regularly.
A dedicated online training platform is accessible here, where you can find the Zoom webinar link, together with speakers’ presentations and additional material that will be progressively uploaded.

The online web platform is accessible at this LINK
(registration key: ESIC's2024)

Each webinar will last 2 academic hours (1 hour and 30 minutes) in English. Two invited talks will take place in the first part, followed by an inclusive discussion and question/answer session.

Final test

DICAM-UNITRENTO students with at least 80% attendance to the seminars (4 over 5 seminars) and pass the final test will be awarded 1 credit type F. Students from other departments of UNITRENTO will have to ask their department secretaries about credit recognition.
The final test consists of a short (5-minute) oral presentation on a date to be fixed in the first half of June 2024. Each student will be asked to identify, describe, and discuss a dual challenge, i.e., which includes both the management/implementation and the technical/scientific levels. The
identified challenge has to be chosen among those that emerged across multiple (at least 2) webinars. The presentation must also refer to at least two of the papers/documents made available in the DOL platform and has to outline possible ways forward to the discussed
challenges. The presentation will be in English.

Certificate of Attendance

At the end of the cycle of webinars, participants who are not enrolled in UNITRENTO or who have not included the cycle of seminars in their study plan, can be issued a certificate of attendance in case they explicitly request it, provided they have attended at least 80% of the webinar hours (4 over 5 seminars).