The 9^th T³ Earth Forum　

Venue: Lecture Hall, RIHN＋online
Date: June 18th, 2025 3-5pm(JST)
Speaker : Prof. R. Bin Wong　（Distinguished Research Professor, UCLA.）
Title：Making 21st-c. Political Economy a Social-Ecological System through Leverage Points Perspectives & Systems Thinking
The brief biography for Prof. Bin Wong :

Before moving to UCLA in 2004 to be the Director (2004-2016) of the UCLA Asia Institute, Bin Wong served as Director of the Center for Asian Studies at UC Irvine where he was Chancellor’s Professor of History and Economics. He has also been a visiting professor and researcher at institutions in mainland China, France, Japan, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. As Director of the UCLA Asia Institute, he was responsible for fostering collaborations with a strong Asian component across campus, nationally, and internationally. These include new inter-disciplinary initiatives spanning research, graduate training, and class room curricula in K-16 settings. Wong’s own research has examined Chinese patterns of political, economic and social change, especially since eighteenth century, both within Asian regional contexts and compared with more familiar European patterns, as part of the larger scholarly efforts under way to make world history speak to contemporary conditions of globalization. Among his books, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Cornell University Press, 1997) is the best known in its English and Chinese editions. Wong has also written or co-authored more than a hundred articles published in published in Chinese, English, French, German and Japanese journals that reach diverse audiences within and beyond academia. Since his retirement from UCLA in 2023 he has been teaching in a graduate program on political economy at the Taipei School of Economics and Political Science.

International Symposium Groundwater Sustainability　

Venue: Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, Japan　+ online
Date: 13:00-17:40 (JST) February 9th, 2024

Objective:
Groundwater is one of major water resources for agriculture, industry, and drinking water, and also important part of environment and culture based on diverse values. About 70 percent of global freshwater consumption is for agriculture and more than half of them is groundwater, therefore groundwater is strongly connected with food production. Groundwater depletion in local scale is connected with global economy through global food trade. Groundwater is also connected with energy. About 60 percent of costs for water allocations including groundwater pumping is from energy sector, and geothermal energy and heat pump are developing as renewable energy for sustainable society. Furthermore, groundwater is deeply connected to human wellbeing as culture diversity. In this symposium, we will discuss how global and local issues on groundwater are related in society, and what can we suggest for sustainable groundwater with transdisciplinary way in global and local scales.

13:00-13:10 Opening remark
13:10-13:50 Makoto Taniguchi (RIHN, Japan)
13:50-14:30 Tom Gleeson (Univ. Victoria, Canada)
14:30-15:10 Yoshihide Wada (KAUST, Saudi Arabia)
15:10-15:30 break
15:30-16:10 Fumi Sugita (Chiba Univ. Commerce, Japan)
16:10-16:50 Kevin Hiscock (Univ. East Anglia, UK)
16:50-17:30 Discussion
17:30-17:40 Closing remark

Sponsorships : IAH Japan, JAGH, JAHS, RIHN