The Department of Agri-food and Environmental Systems Management (DiGeSA) at the University of Catania, the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) and the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE) with the support of the municipality of Belpasso, organise the Belpasso International Summer School on Environmental and Resource Economics.

The broader objective of the Belpasso International Summer School is to provide advanced training for young researchers who are also EAERE members from all over Europe and beyond on European issues of environmental and resource economics.

The School is hosted in the city of Belpasso, in the Province of Catania, Sicily, Italy, and takes place from 2nd to 8th September. This year, the School’s topic is "Sustainable Development: theory and measurement methods”.

Ensuring a continuous increase in well-being throughout the world is one of the main challenges to humankind. Since the mid-80s, awareness that economic growth has not necessarily improved living conditions has led to the quest for sustainable development. The concept of sustainability implies the need to consider in policy agendas the long-term interactions among the economic, environmental and social spheres, reconciling their potential trade-offs.

In spite of the increased effort of the academia, no agreement on the definition and quantitative assessment of sustainability has been reached to date on a worldwide basis. The main aim of the 2012 Belpasso summer school is to collect the latest advancements in the field from research leaders, in order to provide young scholars with the most appropriate theoretical and methodological background and to enable them to make a valuable contribution to the post Rio+20 scientific debate.

 

***Visit the Summer School website***