Track 1: Sustainable Cities and Environments
Track Chairs: Dr Zuraimi Bin Mohamed Sultan and Dr Park Homin
Rapid urbanisation, climate change, resource constraints and evolving societal needs are reshaping how cities are planned, built, operated and experienced. Creating sustainable cities requires more than reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions; it calls for an integrated approach that balances environmental performance, climate resilience, resource efficiency, and quality of life. This theme explores innovative research, technologies, policies, and practices that can support the transition towards sustainable, resilient, and people-centred urban environments. It considers cities as interconnected systems in which buildings, infrastructure, energy, water, mobility, ecosystems, and communities interact, and where interventions in one area may generate benefits, trade-offs, or unintended consequences in others.
Contributions are invited on topics including sustainable and high-performance buildings, energy efficiency and decarbonization, climate adaptation and urban resilience, indoor and outdoor environmental quality, circular economy and resource management, nature-based solutions, smart technologies and AI-enabled urban management, and sustainable facilities and infrastructure management. Contributions that translate scientific knowledge and technological innovation into practical and scalable strategies for improving environmental performance, strengthening resilience, and enhancing urban liveability are particularly encouraged. By bringing together researchers, practitioners, policymakers and industry, this theme seeks to advance integrated and implementable solutions for cities that are greener, more resource-efficient, resilient, and adaptable, while remaining liveable and responsive to future environmental and societal challenges.
Track 2: Social Sustainability & Behavioural Insights
Track Chairs: Dr Tania Nagpaul and Dr Tan Tsiat Siong
Social sustainability refers to the responsibility of organisations and institutions to maintain and improve the well-being of people over time while ensuring equity, inclusivity, and access to essential resources. This track sits at the intersection of social sustainability and behavioural science: even when people and institutions value equity and inclusion, they often do not act accordingly, and behavioural science offers tools to understand this gap and design interventions that close it. In applying these tools, the track also asks whose behaviours are targeted, whose knowledge counts, and who bears the costs and benefits of change, including local communities, indigenous knowledge holders and frontline populations.
We welcome empirical studies, field experiments, case studies, practice-based contributions and conceptual work that bridge research, policy and community practice in the topics that include but are not limited to the following non-exhaustive and non-mutually exclusive sub-themes:
- Behavioural Insights for Social Good
- Behavioural nudging for volunteerism, philanthropy, help-seeking, reducing discrimination
- Co-designing interventions with marginalised, local and Indigenous communities
- Fostering Digital inclusion
- Behavioural insights for Social Sustainability in Education
- Higher education and social sustainability curricula
- The role of lifelong learning
- Youth activism and sustainability
- Behavioural Insights for Social Sustainability in the Workplace
- Equity, and inclusion in the workplace
- Diversity practices in the organisation
- Unconscious Bias training
Track 3: Sustainable Business and Finance
Track Chairs: Dr Carmen Shih and Dr Shuoge Qian
This track examines how finance can be mobilised at scale to address climate and nature challenges, support communities and Asia’s most climate-vulnerable economies, and embed sustainability in how Asian businesses are run. It welcomes research and practical perspectives on sustainable finance, including how businesses integrate environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations into corporate decisions, how investors approach sustainable and impact investing, and how policy and regulation shape sustainable business and financial practices. The track also considers broader dimensions of sustainable development, including the transition to a circular economy and financial inclusion. Papers may examine how businesses, investors, financial institutions and policymakers respond to sustainability challenges, as well as the financial and economic implications of these decisions. The session aims to generate insights that can support sustainable business and financial practices across Asia and contribute to the region’s long-term economic development.
Track 4: Interdisciplinarity and Innovation in Sustainability
Track Chairs: A/P Guan Chong and Dr Yong Ming Li
In 1987, the United Nations’ seminal Brundtland Report (“Our Common Future”) was published, advocating for an interdisciplinary, and integrated approach towards sustainable development that “seeks to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet those of the future”. On the 40th anniversary of the release of Our Common Future, this track reflects on how the contemporary scale, complexity and interconnectedness of sustainability challenges (including climate change, natural resource extraction and supply chains, energy transitions, geopolitical uncertainties, AI development, and the mobilization of finance) presents unprecedented challenges for sustainable development, and how this necessitates collaborative, interdisciplinary and innovative approaches in designing a common future for humanity and social good.
This cross-cutting track situates sustainability challenges within an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, and considers intersections across the other thematic tracks in this conference. This track welcomes papers that apply systems thinking, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches towards addressing contemporary concerns around sustainable development. Papers may examine how cross-sectoral, cross-disciplinary, and cross-scalar collaborations can produce novel insights through the integration of diverse knowledge bodies, worldviews, methodologies, values, and technological mediums. Papers may also examine how interdisciplinarity that incorporates social science approaches can be mobilized for social resilience, alternative development, inclusive policy making, ethical technological advancements, and good governance in the sustainability sphere.