The Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) invites you to attend the first of two workshops toward establishing a multidisciplinary initiative at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign related to advancing the sustainability of Nature-Society Interactions in Developing Communities. The intent of this first workshop is to bring together researchers from across campus to identify synergistic lines of research and build a cohort to pursue external funding.

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A center point for the discussions will be the sustainable provision of safe water and sanitation in East Africa, with the goal of developing a cohesive interdisciplinary vision for sustainable infrastructure systems in resource-limited settings that manage the dynamic interactions between nature and society proactively. Given the central role water and sanitation play in people’s lives and livelihoods in these settings, a broad range of topics are of direct relevance and critical to achieving holistic solutions:

• agriculture and nutrient management;
• energy production, use, and financing;
• nutrition and health;
• gender equity and power dynamics;
• economics, entrepreneurship, and marketing;
• natural resource management and conservation;
• decision-making and behavior change;
• water management and treatment;
• sanitation and resource recovery;
• governance;
• international aid and domestic investment in infrastructure and service delivery; and
• any other topics that will impact or be impacted by water and sanitation systems.

The goals of this first workshop are to:

1. enable individual attendees to introduce key sustainability challenges in their respective disciplines;
2. identify and prioritize research needs and align goals for health, nutrition, income, equity, and environmental sustainability through circular resource management and novel infrastructure; and
3. establish a cohort of multidisciplinary researchers interested in pursuing external funding to build these concepts into a large-scale initiative at the interface between international development.