Connect with SRI

About SRI

The Sustainability Research & Innovation Congress is a series of gatherings that unite global research leaders, experts, industries and innovators to inspire action and promote a sustainability transformation.

A joint initiative of Future Earth and the Belmont Forum, the SRI Congress is a space of dedicated advocacy for sustainability scholarship and innovation, transdisciplinary and cross-sectoral collaboration and action.

SRI2024

The fourth edition of the SRI Congress, SRI2024, is a collaboration between the Sustainability Research and Innovation Congress (SRI), and Finland’s Sustainability Science Days (SSD). With a shared mission to achieve a knowledge-based sustainability transformation, it is exciting to have these two conferences co-located in Helsinki and Espoo, Finland. This year’s themes include (1) Green Transitions, (2) Transforming Technologies and the Future of Work, (3) Living on the Frontlines of Change – the Arctic and Beyond, and (4) Powering the World. The Belmont Forum will hold its in-person plenary on Monday and Tuesday of SRI along with kick-off, mid-term, and end-term meetings, panels, and talks to celebrate and learn from our researchers. In addition, the Secretariat and our members will facilitate and participate in numerous workshops and roundtables throughout the week.
SRI is a joint initiative of Future Earth and the Belmont Forum.

Visit the 2024 congress website here: Sustainability Research & Innovation Congress 2024

SRI2023

SRI2023 logo in teal, blue and grass green.

The third edition of the SRI Congress, SRI2023, will be hosted by the National Secretariat of Science, Technology and Innovation of the Republic of Panama (SENACYT) and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) in June 2023, bringing this global event to the Latin American and Caribbean Region. SRI2023 will take place in Panama City, Panama. This global, annual event elevates diverse knowledge on sustainability, provides an inspiring platform to share innovative ideas, and creates an inclusive space for collaboration and action. SRI is a joint initiative of Future Earth and the Belmont Forum.

Visit the 2023 congress website here: Sustainability Research & Innovation Congress 2023

SRI2022

SRI2022 was the second meeting in the annual SRI series that united global leaders, experts, industry, and innovators to inspire action and promote transformation in sustainability. SRI2022 offered a platform for meaningful solutions to society, transformations at the intersection of research and innovation, and collaborations for change on the ground.

Visit the 2022 congress website here: Sustainability Research & Innovation Congress 2022

SRI2021

About SRI2021

The Sustainability Research & Innovation Congress 2021 (SRI2021) was the world’s first transdisciplinary gathering in sustainability – it was a space of fierce advocacy for sustainability scholarship, innovation collaboration and action. This annual event unites global sustainability leaders, experts, industry and innovators to inspire action and promote a sustainability transformation. https://sri2021.org/

Sessions

The Be Belmont Applicable Series

Please click this link to register for this series

Belmont Forum has provided over $200 million in funding to researchers over the past 10 years on a wide array of topics related to mitigating and adapting to global environmental change. The Belmont Forum’s unique approach to addressing these global challenges is achieved by providing funding opportunities to research consortia that utilize principles of transdisciplinarity and co-production while including meaningful participation of researchers from around the globe, including the Global South. 

Join us for this free event to learn what these guidelines mean to Belmont Forum, how to build trans-national research consortia, and how to tailor submissions for a particular call at the “Be Belmont Applicable” Sessions leading up to SRI 2021. This is an ideal session for researchers interested in how to successfully apply for Belmont Forum funds. The Be Belmont Applicable series will be broken into two sessions, the Belmont Forum Alumni Highlight held on May 17, 2021, followed by the Belmont Forum Technical Submission on May 19, 2021. This session will shine a light on the core aspects needed in a proposal and research group to successfully receive Belmont Forum funds. Learn more about the Belmont Forum challenge and how you can develop an eligible transdisciplinary, transnational proposal addressing global environmental change.  Step through the online submission portal to better understand all of the elements of your proposal that will need to be considered for review. In this 2-part session, you will learn how to apply for future funding opportunities and be prepared to build your future research consortium networks at SRI 2021.

During the 1.5-hour Alumni Highlight, you will hear from researchers across past Collaborative Research Actions that have successfully gone through the process of applying for Belmont Forum funds. They will reflect on how they built a transdisciplinary consortium that fit the specifications for their particular call, their strategies for including stakeholders and social scientists within their research project, what they wished they had considered before their project began, and the impact of the work achieved. The Belmont Forum will take this opportunity to hear from the research community the ways in which we can improve the submission portal. 

Date and Time:

Alumni Highlight Panel: May 17, 1.5 hours beginning at 7:00 am Mountain, 9:00 am Eastern, 10:00 am Brazil, 3:00 pm South Africa, 9:00 pm Taipei

Belmont Forum Technical Submission: May 19 for 1 hour beginning at 7:00 am Mountain, 9:00 am Eastern, 10:00 am Brazil, 3:00 pm South Africa, 9:00 pm Taipei

SRI Virtual Idea Market

The SRI Congress provides an opportunity for students, young professionals, and innovators to share their advances, concepts, designs, prototypes, and products in a global Virtual Idea Market.  Participants in the Idea Market are invited to upload a short video or digital presentation of their idea to the SRI Congress Virtual Market.  Submissions can be at the idea stage and do not need to be developed concepts or results. Submissions will be made available for all registered SRI Congress attendees to preview online before Idea Market sessions.  Each Idea Market session will feature an open forum where submitters can present their idea in a short pitch and take questions from the audience. The submissions will be reviewed and there will be an award for the top two videos.

Video Submission Guidelines:

  1. Fill out this submission form 
  2. Consider applying for the Early Career Scholarship-See details below 
  3. Register for SRI2021
  4. Upload a short (~3min) video to a personal YouTube account
  5. Email the YouTube video link to ideamarket@belmontforum.org
  6. All submissions are due June 10th
  7. You will receive email confirmation for your session time shortly after June 1

Attend open/free sessions like this one at SRI by first signing up here for limited access: https://lnkd.in/ep6WXYr

Or register for the full SRI program here: https://lnkd.in/eApHean

2 sessions to choose from!
Monday, June 14, 2021, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM Brisbane
Session Link: https://lnkd.in/en6UcrY

Tuesday, June 15, 2021, 12:00 AM – 1:30 AM Brisbane
Session Link: https://lnkd.in/eKhhmQf

Please contact ideamarket@belmontforum.org with any inquires.

Check out our example here:

Partnering Across the Resource Ecosystem:

Virtual Workshop

Please click here to register for this workshop

As part of the lead-up to SRI2021, the Belmont Forum is hosting a multi-sectoral dialogue and collaborative working session on practical partnership processes to achieve grand, systemic challenges, such as the Sustainable Development Goals. This virtual gathering of funders from across the resource ecosystem, including but not limited to public and private sector, philanthropy and foundations, deep impact investors and charities aid funds, provides an opportunity to move beyond discussion into practice by experimenting with sustainability scenarios to identify optimized support strategies.

Facilitators will help build a common resource vocabulary with attendees and identify phases and mechanisms for collaborative co-funding to leverage resources and achieve more together than we could on our own. Lessons learned from these partnership engagements will be synthesized and shared during the Sustainability Research and Innovation (SRI) Congress at funder-focused events planned throughout the program. After the Congress, the summary will be made available to all workshop attendees as a handbook.

To help us develop roundtable assignments for the scenario exercises, we encourage participants to share documentation about your organization, portfolio, or purview – for example, annual investment reports, impact statements, and portfolio PowerPoints. While we won’t be doing any actual funding at the workshop, if you have programs you are seeking partners for co-investment, please consider sharing those at the workshop. If you agree, we will make the documents and partnership opportunities available to registered workshop participants after the event.

Session Date and Time:

A 3-hour interactive session will be held on Tuesday, May 18 at 13h00 UTC to offer attendees. Please click on the links to see the session times in your time zone. We will be using a government-secured Zoom platform.

Please submit any shareable documents or logistics questions to info@belmontforum.org

Bridging Local Policy and Community

for Sustainable Transformations

There is growing awareness within scientific and practitioner communities that if research is to have a transformational impact on society, it has to be aligned and integrated with communities’ needs at relevant scales. The local scale is a critical action point where tailored solutions to local sustainability challenges can be implemented through policy and supported by the community. One critical lever at the community level is local government, but many researchers do not know the entry points or approaches for collaborating with government representatives. This session introduces engagement methods and evaluatory frameworks for strategic, effective collaboration at the local science-policy interface. Focusing on real-world experiences in low and middle-income countries, this interactive panel features experts in participatory methods from across the globe. This session focuses on transdisciplinary activity within and across communities to support informed decision-making.

Join us Tuesday, June 15 @ 8-9:30 am eastern day time on the SRI Virtual Platform to answer questions such as:

How did you establish effective relationships with local governments?

How can we bridge the engagement gap between the community and local government to create sustainable solutions that benefit society?

To join us, either fully register for SRI or sign up for a free/limited registration to attend this event:
Free/Limited Access: https://lnkd.in/ep6WXYr
Session Link: https://lnkd.in/ewbARCH

Or Register for the full SRI program here: https://lnkd.in/eApHean

Moderator: 

Laura Cline

Director, the Cities’ COVID Mitigation Mapping (C2M2) Program, U.S. Department of State, Humanitarian Information Unit, Office of the Geographer and Global Issues 

Panelists:

Jessica Barlow

Professor at San Diego State University, Executive Director, Center on Regional Sustainability, Vice President of the Epic-Network

Nama Budhathoki

Founder and Executive Director at Kathmandu Living Labs, Director of the Asia Hub for Secondary Cities and C2N2

Melinda Laituri

Professor at Colorado State University, Principal Investigator of the Secondary Cities Initiative and C2N2, U.S. Department of State, Office of the Geographer

Gaston Mbonglou

President of the USA Cameroon Chamber of Commerce, Director of the Africa Hub for Secondary Cities and C2N2