Exploring inner sustainability through aerosol science: NSYSU in Taiwan hosts the first Internationa

Description

The world is facing multiple ecological challenges caused by human activities, including air pollution, global climate changes, posing significant threats to the ecological sustainability of the Earth. The Aerosol Science Research Center (ASRC) of National Sun Yat-sen University (NSYSU), Taiwan hosted the “2024 International IDG Forum: From Aerosol Sciences Toward a Sustainable Earth” at the National Science and Technology Museum. The forum took aerosol science as a special lens and integrated science, art, and philosophy, to manifest the close connectedness between humans and the ecological environment. Breaking free from traditional thinking frameworks, this IDG event attracted 170 participants from Taiwan, the United States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Turkey, and other countries, who joined either in-person or online, to discuss concrete strategies to address environmental crises.
Prof. Chia C. Wang, Director of the ASRC at NSYSU and Coordinator of Taiwan Kaohsiung IDG Hub, emphasized that strengthening Inner Development Goals (IDGs) and reflecting personal and collective inner values, followed by making necessary transformations, can facilitate the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Wang further explained that aerosols, fine particles suspended in the air, are ubiquitous and intricately linked to Earth’s major systems—the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere—at the molecular level. Awareness of this complexity helps people deeply comprehend the connectedness among everything, and the essence of the oneness as a whole, and eventually take actions to make necessary changes to improve our shared environment, and co-create a more sustainable future for all.
Minister of Education of Taiwan, Dr. Ying-Yao Cheng stated that many inner qualities emphasized by the IDGs, such as critical thinking, complexity awareness, long-term orientation and visioning, sense of connectedness, and empathy and compassion for others, are key elements for solving numerous ongoing ecological crisis and co-creating a sustainable future. Jan Artem Henriksson, Executive Director of Inner Development Goals also provided a pre-recorded opening remark .