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SSRP Hosts Its Seventh Annual Symposium on Synergy Drivers for Accelerating Action on the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Sussex Sustainability Research Programme (SSRP) hosted its seventh Annual Symposium at the Institute of Development Studies on Wednesday, 26 November 2025. This year’s theme, ‘Synergy Drivers for Accelerating Action on the SDGs’, showcased recent SSRP research and policy engagement to identify innovative policies and measures that can foster synergistic interactions among multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals while minimising trade-offs. As usual, it was an exceptional opportunity to exchange the latest innovative ideas about sustainability.

The Symposium, which was open to staff, students and the general public, opened with an overview of SSRP’s Synergy Drivers approach and highlights from a recent report commissioned by UK FCDO which was launched at a Side Event of the UN General Assembly at UN Headquarters in New York in July of this year.

Fourteen researchers from across Sussex and IDS then gave brief presentations on their sustainability research across three sessions based on themes that highlight SDG interactions:

1. Ecosystems, Rights and Justice – including action-research on Integrating health, biodiversity, and climate action in Papua New Guinea; soundscapes as intangible heritage in the Ecuadorian Amazon; and the rights of nature in Latin America 
2. Sustainability Frontiers and South Coast Sustainability – including several projects on transforming Brighton and Hove's food system and the wider South Coast region, and a new set of studies on the intersections of just transitions in resource-rich countries, both North and South.
3. Sustainable Climate and Food Systems – including research on anticipatory action to extreme, co-located hazards, Transformation Labs for climate resilience in the tropical drylands, and participatory processes for evaluating complexity across the climate-energy-food nexus in the UK.

Presenters described numerous new findings from these studies. Some examples:

Shilpi Srivastava reported that the local mandi (wholesale market) and dairy industry served as centres of preparedness in West India against droughts and floods.

Joanna Smallwood reported on deepening work on the Rights of Nature which has now been elaborated as Rights of Ecosystems, Rights of Species, and Rights of Individual Animals.

Alex Penn characterised sustainability challenges as complex adaptive systems problems; she described positive results from using causal maps and other systems tools as part of stakeholder processes to help sort out, for example, the achievement of transport decarbonisation. 

John Thompson and Chris Sandom reported on breaking new ground with experimental sustainability institutions. John reported on the positive, but complex, experience of Transformation Labs in India, Nigeria, and Tansania as places where stakeholders and researchers co-design and test ideas and innovations. Meanwhile, Chris reported on launching a new Sustainability Observatory on the South Coast for acquiring biodiversity and other nature-related data in the context of policy action.

Each set of presentations was followed by a lively panel Q&A session to compare and contrast experiences and draw out common lessons.

The Symposium closed with a fruitful plenary discussion on ‘Sustainability Work at Sussex’ under the new Sussex School for Progressive Futures (SSPF), the University’s flagship hub to catalyse and coordinate a distinctive, world-changing programme of interdisciplinary education, research, and global and civic engagement. The session highlighted opportunities for the SSRP community to work with SSPF on this ambitious agenda, particularly in advancing ‘Environmental Sustainability’.

John Thompson - j.thompson@ids.ac.uk; Joseph Alcamo - Joseph Alcamo@sussex.ac.uk

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