Here’s your guide to ESRAG’s 2021 Rotary PreConvention webinar: a feast of 30-minute talks throughout the day by leading experts on environmental challenges and solutions. Your $20 registration enables you to view the talks that interest you. Register here and share the invitation with your friends and colleagues!

To make the program accessible to viewers anywhere in the world, the entire symposium will be broadcast twice, once starting at 8:30 am CST time (Taipei time), and again at 8:30 am EDT (New York time).  There will be a five-hour interlude of environmental videos between the end of the Taipei session and the beginning of the New York session. Questions from the webinar will be collected and answers posted with the videos when they are archived on the ESRAG website. This will provide an array of talks of an ideal length for Club meetings and District or Zone workshops. 

Each talk illustrates a challenge and solutions consistent with Rotary International’s new Environment policy. This will give you a sense of the range of projects Rotarians are now encouraged to undertake under the new Area of Focus, plus the expertise you can access through ESRAG.

Dr Christopher Puttock and Dr Patricia Armstrong will serve as Co-Hosts, welcoming you at 8:30 with an overview, and providing closing remarks. Chris, a systematic botanist, is Co-Chair of ESRAG and President of the Maryland Native Plant Society.  Pat is ESRAG's Communications Director and has doctorate in adolescent leadership for sustainability. Both hold and have held multiple leadership roles in Rotary.  See below for a glimpse of the topics and credentials of our speakers.

The land, the water, and the air - the substrates for all life on this planet - have been damaged by the lack of good stewardship of these natural resources. As our human population approaches eight billion, the weight of our presence is undeniable. Signs of the changes that we have made are everywhere. 

In Session 1, we focus on human interventions to mitigate two significant planetary environmental problems: microplastics throughout our ecosystems, and fire ecology exacerbated by changing weather systems and human rearrangement of the ecological landscape.

This hour's Moderator is Dr Gunilla Östberg, Co-Chair of ESRAG's Europe Chapter.

9:00 am:  Microplastics

Dr Tamara Galloway, OBE

9:30 am: Fire Socio-Ecology

Dr Toddi Steelman

Biodiversity - the plants and animals of the air, sea, and soil -  provides the life-giving services and resources that fill our lungs with oxygen and our stomachs with food.

Thirty percent of the world’s forests have been replaced with farmland. In many places our farming practices have changed soil to wasteland. 

Our seas have been scoured for anything living, turning the ocean into aquatic deserts.

In this hour, moderated by botanist and ESRAG Board Chair Chris Puttock, we focus on human interventions to heal two biodiversity problems: co-existing with  large animals, and helping hungry communities to discover the vast diversity of local plant foods that we ignore to our peril and that our lifestyle endangers.

10:30 am: Edible Plants

PDG Una Hobday, OAM

For the past 200 years, more than 80% of our energy needs have been supplied by fossil fuels. This was heat and light, transformed by plants, locked into carbon, and stored deep underground. Life on earth took several hundred millions years to sequester this heat and power. 

Humanity is now liberating this energy literally thousands of times faster than it was made. Consequently, we are overheating our world every second. 

This hour focuses on human interventions to tackle two significant energy environmental problems: the way we can capture and use energy locally, and our transition away from fossil fuels. Aur Beck, Chair of ESRAG's Renewable Energy Task Force, will serve as moderator. He is Founder and Chief Technician of Advanced Energy Solutions' AES Solar.

11:00 am: Solar in Schools

Robert Edwards, OAM

Affordable solar technology for producing energy is now readily available, and energy storage is rapidly catching up. Using solar arrays to power education in schools is now a matter of resolving priorities. Environmental education and well-being can be rapidly enhanced by these solar installations.

Rob Edwards is the founder and CEO of of Its Time Foundation. He worked in the health industry for twenty-five years, including five years in cardiac rehabilitation and two years with disadvantaged youth.  He also founded Its Time's Plastic Free Oceans initiative and Sustainable Social. 

With fellow Rotarians from clubs in Sydney Cove, Sydney, Darling Harbour, and Corrimal, Australia, he launched the quarterly Climate and Peace Forum  in 2020.  In 2020 Rob was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for his charitable work. When not working with the Its Time Foundation, Rob is a professional speaker.

11:30 am: Alternate Energy

Joy Huang

Fossil fuels have been the keystone of energy for the industrial revolution. Their use remains unabated in society today. 

They are also the uncontested primary source of greenhouse gasses and heat pollution impacting the climate all over the world. How quickly and radically can future-oriented policies curtail their use and reverse climate disruption? 

DS Joy Huang is the CEO of Sun Power Silicon Co, Ltd. She has an extensive background in renewable energy, architecture, and urban design. She is also in charge of an architecture firm and two renewable energy companies in Taiwan.

She has been part of the Rotary family since 1999, and has participated in Rotary events and projects in more than eight countries during this time. As a philanthropist and a Rotarian, DS Joy has been frequently honored for her dedication and service to the community.

Over the past several millennia, humanity deviated from the natural circle of life by creating a linear economy of things. Humans made products to be durable, then disposable when their useful life was over. This waste stream was a trickle two centuries ago, but it has grown into a torrent of waste that too often ends up in landfills or is incinerated.

The circular economy emulates the circle of life, designing commodities that will have a new life when the first purpose has been consumed.

This hour focuses on strategies to meet two significant circularity environmental problems: the way we use resources in our communities, and the vast, largely unnoticed environmental costs of our clothing.

The session moderator is Dr Yaşar Atacık, Founder and Executive Director of the Turkish Carbon Footprint and Sustainability Association.  He is ESRAG's Board Secretary, and a member and Past President of the Acarkent Rotary Club of Istanbul.

1:00 pm: Circularity and Community Resiliency

Brian Braginton-Smith

In connected communities, wastewater is converted to clean water, energy, oxygen and food. These communities also capture excesses of carbon dioxide, nutrients and methane. Resource reclamations, driven by re-use, repurposing and recycling, are managed by microgrid-based SMART "Internet of Things" networks. These systems can help us achieve Net-Zero Communities.

Brian Braginton-Smith is Executive Director of the Lewis Bay Research Center in Massachusetts, USA, President and CEO of Aquagen-ISI, and Smart Cities Director of Boston Greenfest. He has spent his career working in ocean and environmental science, collaborating with the U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA, and the U.S. Department of Energy. Brian began the discussion on offshore wind energy which bore fruit in the Cape Wind Project. He has been working to advanced infrastructure systems, alternative resource development, and, ultimately, the Connected Community nexus. Brian has made the Cape Cod Watershed Institute into a living laboratory for experiential learning. He is developing a net-zero campus at his alma mater, Dennis-Yarmouth High School, where he was an Interact member for four years. Brian is a member of the Yarmouth, Massachusetts Rotary Club, and a Paul Harris Fellow.

1:30 pm: Textiles

Ebru Debbağ

Clothing is a very significant pollution source worldwide.  Textile pollution begins with farming and synthetic fabrics. After wasting closet space for many years, garments end up as trash in landfills, leading to greenhouse gas emissions and leaching poisons into soil and water. Ms Debbağ will help us through this maze to minimize the environmental damage of our fabric footprint.

Ebru Debbağ has more than 30 years' experience in the fashion supply chain.  She is currently consulting for global industry stakeholders in their transition to circularity through her platform Indigofriends, which is based in New York City and Istanbul. 

Ebru is a graduate of the prestigious American Robert College of Istanbul, and earned a degree in textile engineering from Istanbul Technical University. She is also a part of the Singularity University network. Notable is Ebru’s 27 years in Orta Anadolu, where she led global sales, marketing, product development and R&D. She is currently leading sales, marketing and sustainability for Soorty Enterprises, based in Pakistan. 

Ebru is a co-founder at Permatürk Foundation and serves on the board of Etkiyap Dernegi and Yuvam Dünya.

Long gone is the time when human presence was so insignificantly small as to not to make any noticeable impact on our planet. Today, when we look around ourselves, there is virtually no place where our footprint cannot be seen, felt, or heard. Our surroundings, our neighborly interactions, our natural and built environments all affect our well-being: our health, equity, and happiness. The joy of living requires this harmony and balance, expressed in the curiosity, sustainability and resilience we have with our world.

This final hour of the New Environment Symposium focuses on interventions to change two significant behavioral problems. The first is what we eat, which not only affects our health, but also the environment. The second is managing the burden of the oversized collective human footprint.  Our moderator is Rick Randolph, MD, ESRAG's Board Chair Elect and Senior Chief Medical Officer of Heart to Heart International, leading medical, disaster response, and public health programs.

2:00 pm: What We Eat

Dr Geetha Jayaram

Our food chain accounts for 80% of deforestation, 85% of fish-stock depletion, and 70% of freshwater use. Even without climate change - and the degree to which what (and how much) we eat affects our health - this impact does not bode well for life on Earth. Dr Jayaram recommends stepping up to eat to beat climate change and biodiversity loss.

Dr Geetha Jayaram is an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. She received The Rotary Foundation Global Alumni Service to Humanity Award at the RI Convention in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2015, being honored for her work over the past two decades serving the poor and mentally ill in Baltimore, and for establishing the Maanasi Clinic in Mugalur, Karnataka. This is a network of mental health clinics for women and children in her native India which now serve more than two million people. She also teaches at St. John’s Medical College in Bangalore. Dr Jayaram is renowned for her advocacy of health through plant-based diets.

2:00 pm: Carbon Net-Zero

by 2030: the Role of Rotary

Dr Sibyl Anwander

Global warming should not exceed 1.5°C. The emission of greenhouse gasses has to be reduced and avoided as much as possible. We can all contribute to the necessary change. But carbon capture and sequestration will also be important. We had better make changes now, or next generations will have to spend much more to repair the damage!

Dr Sibyl Anwander, CEO of anwander consulting, worked as a researcher and lecturer in the field of Agricultural Economics at ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), before taking over as lead of Public Affairs and Sustainability with the Swiss Retailer Coop. In this function, she served on various boards of business initiatives for sustainable supply chains. She then became Head of Economics at the Federal Office for the Environment, with a special focus on sustainable consumption and production, resource economics, and sustainable finance. Since moving to Hamburg, she has been working as an independent sustainability consultant. Her expertise is in potentials of Natural Carbon Solutions (NCS) in working toward Net Zero.