Aims and Scope of the seminar series

What has been the goal and achievement of RIHN since its establishment, while adopting a unique research format? What can we add to our activities to develop our own unique research institute while collaborating with and segregating ourselves from other research institutes and society? Director General and Program Directors, faculty members who have bird's-eye views of RIHN with wide expertise and knowledge, will talk about the current situation of RIHN from their own viewpoints, in order to make the RIHN members think about the issues.

- First, I will perform an open inquiry with RIHN staff, based on two rounds of face-to-face meetings (starting with the deputy directors and the leaders of research programs and of specific research projects in October). I expect that this open inquiry will reveal promising synergies with significant added value (for example, between the concepts of lifeworlds (research program 3) and worldviews (Rigolot, 2018); or as regard a quantum conceptualization (Rigolot, 2019) of societal transformations (research program 1), ect.; - Second, I will put this “cross-fertilization” to the test of a practical collaboration related to the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus (Taniguchi et al., 2017; Lee et al., 2020). Globally, the livestock sector uses more than 80% of agricultural land and consumes about 33% of global water withdrawals, primarily for irrigation of feed crops (FAO, 2006). The impacts of livestock farming on water resource is a highly controversial topic though, notably because methods for the estimations of water use give wildly different results (for example, from 3 to 540 L to produce 1 kg of beef with Life Cycle Assessment; Doreau et al., 2012). To move the debate forward, a promising research frontier is to better differentiate “blue” and “green “water, in connection with spatially explicit land use at multiple scales. In this perspective, during the fellowship I will explore the multiscale WEF nexus developed by Taniguchi et al. (2020) through a livestock lens.

Each talk will ellucidate "what is still missing for fundamental understanding and solution of global environmental problems" as well as "what has already been revealed" and "what we want to (and should) work on in the future" based on the expertise of the speakers and the research activities of RIHN so far.