Sustainability in higher education for the global south: A conversation across geographies and disciplines

A workshop on ‘Sustainability in Higher Education from the vantage of the Global South’ was organized by the Azim Premji University between 12 and 14 January 2015 in Bengaluru, India. Its goal was to explore how sustainability can be integrated into undergraduate, postgraduate and professional courses. The workshop was divided into four sessions with interlinked themes – the first, with a focus on framing sustainability; the second, on integrating sustainability in higher education; the third, on sustainability curricula; and the last, on pedagogy for sustainability. All four sessions were informed by the broader educational goal of enabling students from diverse backgrounds to envision, conceptualise, research and implement sustainability in varied personal and professional contexts. Participants of the workshop drew upon their varied experiences, from India and institutions across the world, in the teaching and learning of the multidimensional concept of sustainability in diverse geographies. The questions, counterquestions, discussions and potential solutions raised during the workshop are presented in this paper in a dialogic style

Seeing versus Doing: How Businesses Manage Tensions in Pursuit of Sustainability

Management of organizational tensions can facilitate the simultaneous advancement of economic, social, and environmental priorities. The approach is based on managers identifying and managing tensions between the three priorities, by employing one of the three strategic responses. Although recent work has provided a theoretical basis for such tension acknowledgment and management, there is a dearth of empirical studies. We interviewed 32 corporate sustainability managers across 25 forestry and wood-products organizations in Australia. Study participants were divided into two groups: (1) those considered effective at corporate sustainability and (2) a status-quo group. Contrary to current theory, our findings showed that acknowledgment of organizational tensions was widespread in the Australian forestry and wood-products industry and not limited to those managers who are effective at managing corporate sustainability. What differed was the degree to which managers did something about the perceived tensions—with the effective group more consistently acting to manage and resolve paradoxical scenarios. Our findings suggest that existing theoretical constructs of tension management may not adequately capture the individual-level complexity involved with managing tensions in practice

Poverty, biodiversity and institutions in forest-agriculture ecotones in the Western Ghats and Eastern Himalaya ranges of India

Forest-agricultural ecotones are defined as areas that adjoin forests and other natural habitats and that lie between forests and zones of intensive agriculture. These ecotones are critical for conservation of biodiversity and for the maintenance of livelihoods of people that inhabit these areas. Here we focus on three questions: (1) How can we make land use sustainable in forest agriculture ecotones? (2) How can forest agriculture ecotones contribute to conservation of biodiversity? (3) How can we improve the institutions that foster sustainability and conservation of biodiversity in forest-agriculture ecotones? We address these questions in the context of interventions to foster biodiversity and rural livelihoods made by the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment(ATREE),Bangalore, in theWestern Ghats and the Eastern Himalayas, 2 of the 34 global hotspots of biodiversity in India. At several sites, ATREE’s interventions have improved the livelihoods of several rural communities by providing increased income from non-timber forest products (NTFPs), diversification of livelihoods and enhanced agricultural production. These interventions have improved the prospects for sustainable land use in the forest agriculture ecotones. Simultaneously, ATREE’s interventions have strengthened a range of village level and regional institutions that play a critical role in the rural economy and in conservation of biodiversity. We believe that the path to sustainability in agriculture as well as maintenance of biodiversity passes through adaptive strong and relevant institutions. The development of institutions however is severely constrained by low social and human capital and the neglect of forest-agriculture ecotones by the governmental agencies and international organizations. We argue that forest-agriculture ecotones offer a means to conserve biodiversity through alleviation of poverty and development of community-based institutions

Performance Analysis of OFDM Transceiver with Folded FFT and LMS Filter

Abstract — This paper presents an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transceiver that makes use of a low power Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) along with a Least Mean Square (LMS) filter. The folded FFT is developed via folding transformation and register minimization techniques with real values as inputs which leads to reduction in hardware complexity by exploiting the redundancy present in computing the FFT samples and also the amount of power consumed. A LMS filter is also designed for the purpose of noise removal. The OFDM transceiver with the folded FFT and LMS filter is analyzed in terms of error performance to validate the advantages of less power consumption and hardware utilization when compared to the traditional OFDM system with conventional FFT. The individual components and the entire OFDM system that has been proposed are modeled using Verilog HDL and functionally verified using Xilinx ISIM simulator