The Friends of the Lehigh University Libraries invite you to join us on Wednesday, May 24 from 4:30 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. via Zoom for Multisolving: Protecting the Climate While Improving Health, Equity, Biodiversity, and Well-Being, presented by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin, Founder and Director of the Washington, D.C.-based Multisolving Institute.
Climate change. Biodiversity loss. Racial, gender, and economic inequity. Global pandemic and other health crises. Each of these challenges is serious on its own, but they also interact, amplifying each other, burdening society’s limited capacity to respond to crisis and emergency. The good news is that the same interconnections that lead to cascading crises also open up the possibility of synergistic solutions. Multisolving focuses on these possibilities – instances where the same intervention can yield multiple benefits. For example, when a neighborhood installs green roofs and gardens they reduce the impact of heatwaves, reduce flooding, improve air and water quality, and boost residents’ sense of well-being. That’s an example of multisolving. This webinar will share bright spots of how multisolving has been used around the world to address climate change while also producing benefits in health, equity, and well-being. It will also explore the obstacles to multisolving and how people are overcoming them.
The lecture will be followed by a Q&A session led by University Librarian, Boaz Nadav-Manes. This event is free and open to the public.
Please register in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
About the speaker:
Elizabeth Sawin is the Founder and Director of the Multisolving Institute. Beth is an expert on solutions that address climate change while also improving health, well-being, equity, and economic vitality. She developed the idea of ‘multisolving’ to help people see and create the conditions for such win-win-win solutions. Beth writes and speaks about multisolving, climate change, and leadership in complex systems for both national and international audiences. Her work has been published widely, including in Non-Profit Quarterly, The Stanford Social Innovation Review, U. S. News, The Daily Climate, and System Dynamics Review.
Beth’s work has been profiled in Dumbo Feather, Forbes, the Revelator, and in numerous podcasts. She has trained and mentored global sustainability leaders in the Donella Meadows Fellows Program and provided systems thinking training to both Ashoka and Dalai Lama Fellows. Since 2014, Beth has participated in the Council on the Uncertain Human Future, a continuing dialogue on issues of climate change and sustainability among a select group of humanities scholars, writers, artists, and climate scientists. Beth is also a member of the advisory board to the Kresge Foundation’s Climate Change Health and Equity Program. A biologist with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Beth co-founded Climate Interactive in 2010 and served as Climate Interactive’s Co-Director from 2010 until 2021. While at Climate Interactive, she led the scientific team that offered the first assessment of the sufficiency of country pledges to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Beth also led Climate Interactive’s efforts to integrate measures of equity, health and well-being into decision support tools and computer simulations. Beth trained in system dynamics and sustainability with Donella Meadows and worked at Sustainability Institute, the research institute founded by Meadows, for 13 years. She has two adult daughters and lives in rural Vermont where she and her husband grow as much of their own food as they can manage.
Sponsored by The Friends of the Lehigh University Libraries.