Background

Asia faces complex and urgent sustainability challenges driven by overlapping environmental, social, and economic factors. With over two-thirds of the global population, rapid economic growth, and vast social inequalities, Asia’s environmental changes involve intricate interactions that need holistic understanding. Marine, terrestrial, and freshwater ecosystems are degraded by multiple drivers, such as rising food demand, development projects, intensive agriculture, overfishing, invasive species, pollution, and land-use changes. Consequently, critical SDGs related to water (6), climate change (13), biodiversity, and ecosystem health (14, 15) are falling behind, with some showing regressive trends.

Data on socio-ecological systems are often fragmented, insufficient, and disconnected from local lifestyles. Incomplete and incoherent information, combined with a lack of culturally relevant sustainability visions and knowledge coordination, creates deficits in translating information into action. The SDGs alone do not fully capture the systemic challenges unique to Asia, and a reframed approach that aligns with the region’s lived cultural experiences is essential for addressing these issues. Evidence points to frequent transgressions of safe ecological and social boundaries, with ecological overshoots and social shortfalls persisting across the region.  Addressing these complexities requires a multiscale, adaptable knowledge system that comprehensively understands the problems and enables context-based solutions.

Primary Goals

  • Establish a well-functioning Meta-Network Hub infrastructure following an intensive co-design approach with the goal of generating context-specific, actionable science to inform regional policy and practice by connecting different networks, information, processes, and harnessing local science communities embedded within universities, colleges, and civil society organizations.
  • Implement demonstration projects showcasing solutions for ecological health, social equity, and economic resilience to produce socially robust knowledge synthesis, detect and anticipate dynamic changes in the socioeconomic systems, and generate verified data for SDGs monitoring, scenario building, and continuously updated context-based assessments with analytics on a demand-and-issue basis.
  • Facilitate science dialogue with policymakers and actors as bi-directional-information exchange to reframe sustainability indicators with the Asian context, ensuring regional relevance and effectiveness.
  • Capacity development for target partners (political decision-makers, early careers, youth) and capacity building for scientists to engage with non-scientific actors and conduct transdisciplinary research.

How Meta Hub Will Work

Complex socio-ecological systems grow and develop in terms of biomass/capital, information, and boundaries by expanding connections and layers of networks consisting of many nodes and links. Nodes represent system’s components or entities (e.g., actors, species, organizations, resources), whereas links depict interactions (through the process of energy, materials, and information or communication exchange) between and among the nodes. Hub is a node with many links that greatly exceed the average.

Meta-network Hub (or Meta Hub) coordinates and nudges effective interactions within and across different networks by forming layered integrated systems. As a network of networks, it coordinates the generation and exchange of knowledge across different scales and facilitates interactions among various networks using an innovative combination of science and digital technology.

Core Principles

  1. Outcome and Application-Focused: Prioritize measurable outcomes contributing to local SDG progress, bridging the gap between science and policy.
  2. Participation and Capacity Building: Encourage transparent, inclusive collaboration with an emphasis on training early-career researchers and knowledge users.
  3. Sharing Knowledge and Co-learning: Promote knowledge sharing and cross-learning among stakeholders to tackle complex challenges.
  4. Collective Ownership: Ensure that local authorities and communities take ownership of outputs, leveraging existing scientific expertise to address SDG challenges.

Partners

     Fenner School

Sponsor

Meta-Network Hub for Sustainability in Asia initiative is being supported by the International Science Council Regional Focal Point for Asia and the Pacific, which is funded by the Australian Department of Industry, Science and Resources and led by the Australian Academy of Science.

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