‘Maintaining balance and harmony’: Javanese perceptions of health and cardiovascular disease

Community intervention programmes to reduce cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors within urban communities in developing countries are rare. One possible explanation is the difficulty of designing an intervention that corresponds to the local context and culture

Towards a Cross-Sectoral View of Nature-Based Solutions for Enabling Circular Cities

A framework developed by the COST Action Circular City (an EU-funded network of 500+ scientists from 40+ countries; COST = Cooperation in Science and Technology) for addressing Urban Circularity Challenges (UCCs) with nature-based solutions (NBSs) was analyzed by various urban sectors which refer to different fields of activities for circular management of resources in cities (i.e., reducing use of resources and production of waste). The urban sectors comprise the built environment, urban water management, resource recovery, and urban farming. We present main findings from sector analyses, discuss different sector perspectives, and show ways to overcome these differences. The results reveal the potential of NBSs to address multiple sectors, as well as multiple UCCs. While water has been identified as a key element when using NBSs in the urban environment, most NBSs are interconnected and also present secondary benefits for other resources. Using representative examples, we discuss how a holistic and systemic approach could facilitate the circular use of resources in cities. Currently, there is often a disciplinary focus on one resource when applying NBSs. The full potential of NBSs to address multifunctionality is, thus, usually not fully accounted for. On the basis of our results, we conclude that experts from various disciplines can engage in a cross-sectoral exchange and identify the full potential of NBSs to recover resources in circular cities and provide secondary benefits to improve the livelihood for locals. This is an important first step toward the full multifunctionality potential enabling of NBSs

Curating the conditions for a thrivable planet: systemic leverage points for emerging a global eco-civilization

Our team worked on the practical design challenge of creating a series of related international events that address issues of livability and thrivability in terms of systemic socioecological innovation. To do this, we focused at two systemic levels of intervention: at one level (which became the meta-level), we focused on curating the conditions for a thrivable planet. This was the larger vision – the idealized design objective that allowed us to contemplate a variety of pathways to address this objective. In this sense, it served as a design attractor for our work. We then chose to focus upon one feasible and realizable pathway that could serve as a functional prototype for addressing the meta-level objective. The 57th Meeting and Conference of the ISSS, set for Viet Nam in July of 2013, was selected to serve as the systemic case for our specific contextual design initiative. This became our system in focus, and our design efforts were then concentrated on setting an actionable agenda for the realization of this event. Given that there are numerous pathways to address the metalevel design objective, we set the system level objective for the ISSS Conference based on the theme of Systemic Leverage Points for Emerging a Global Eco-Civilization. By setting this focus we intended for ISSS 2013 to provide both a platform for other contextual designs framed within the meta-level objective of curating the conditions for a thrivable planet, as well as to catalyze the emergence of a network of such initiatives through the specific system level focus chosen for this event. We considered that the selected conference theme would attract living cases of systemic sustainability – those which demonstrate socio-ecological innovations that span social, technological, economic, agricultural, and infrastructural domains. By focusing ISSS 2013 on the exploration of both real-world cases of systemic sustainability and theoretical models dedicated to their promotion, this event will serve to seed the emergence of a Global Living Laboratory network of such initiatives. The result of this event would therefore be the emergence of an auto-catalytic socio-technical system focused on individual projects of systemic sustainability that collectively contribute to the creation of conditions for a thrivable planet. The design we worked out for ISSS 2013 was based on the four ways of knowing described by Heron and Reason in 19971, moving from experiential knowing to presentational knowing to propositional knowing to practical knowing. Through both local and virtual conversation-based systemic inquiry, our design offers a key example of systemic socio-ecological innovation aided by collective intelligence.Alexander Laszlo, Stefan Blachfellner, Ockie Bosch, Nam Nguyen, Violeta Bulc, Mary Edson, Jennifer Wilby, George Pó

Building capacity to improve respiratory care: the education strategy of the International Primary Care Respiratory Group 2014–2020

"Article number: 14072 (2014)"Significant attention has been given to the global burden of noncommunicable diseases including respiratory diseases and the potential of primary care to address this challenge. The International Primary Care Respiratory Group (IPCRG) has a potentially significant role to build capacity through research and education in a complex global network with varying degrees of capability. In this paper we outline a comprehensive strategy, which revisits the IPCRG's educational role, our aims, audiences and approach in this context. The paper was developed through a collaborative process involving experts in global health, primary care and respiratory education, leading to a consensus educational strategy statement. This is further informed by a review of recent trends in continuing medical education. Professional education and training of health-care workers is a core component of the global response to the challenge of managing respiratory conditions in primary care. This paper offers a revised strategy for building capacity and improving clinical practice in IPCRG member countries by revisiting and broadening our aims, exploring the key audiences, focus and approaches