The UNU has signed an agreement with and Japanese advertising and media company Dentsu to collaborate on joint projects. The aim is to “garner the wisdom of humankind” in search of new values for the twenty-first century.

In September, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dr. e.H. Erich J. Plate retired from the Advisory Committee of UNU-EHS. He had been a member since the inauguration of the committee in 2003, when UNU-EHS was founded.

The co-winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics, Elinor Ostrom, has been associated with UNU-WIDER for more than a decade. She a contributor to the UNU-WIDER research project on Land Distribution, Land Reform and Economic Growth and more recently worked on the 2004 UNU-WIDER conference on “Unlocking Human Potential”.

In early October, UNU Rector Osterwalder toured the headquarters of Shimadzu Corp. in Kyoto. Shimadzu, a producer of chemical analysis equipment, has been a long-term supporter of the UNU project “Environmental Monitoring and Governance in the Asian Coastal Hydrosphere“.

Can traditional knowledge converge with Western science to help solve today’s global challenges? Numerous research initiatives are exploring this question, such as an Australian carbon abatement project that is based on Aboriginal fire-burning practices.

Earlier this year, Prof. Dr. Janos Bogardi retired after almost six years as Director of the UNU Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) and two years as UNU Vice-Rector ad interim. This is his “open letter of farewell”.

The week-long 2009 UNU & MRF Summer Academy on Social Vulnerability focused on understanding the nature of tipping points of climate change as they are related to potential humanitarian crises and forced migration.

UNW-DPC, in cooperation with FAO and 2iE, organized a July regional workshop in Burkina Faso on “Capacity Development for Farm Management Strategies to Improve Crop-Water Productivity using AquaCrop”.

The Regional Impact of Technological Change in 2020 is a UNU-MERIT project that seeks to improve our understanding of the relation between the shift towards a knowledge-based economy and regional disparities in Europe.

The paper “Designing plans for organizational development, lessons from three large-scale SME-initiatives”, derived from the UNU-MERIT Strategic Innovation project, was selected as the IIE’s 2009 Best Track Paper in Engineering Management.

UNU-MERIT research fellows present a report on measuring creativity, design and innovation at the national level at an international conference in Brussels in May.

The 2009 six-week session of the UNU International Courses commenced on 11 May, attended by 51 postgraduate students and young professionals from 40 countries.

On 2 April, UNU and Kirin Holdings marked the successful completion of the 2008–2009 UNU-Kirin Fellowship Programme with an award ceremony for the programme’s five graduates.

On 17 February, UNU Rector Konrad Osterwalder and Vice-Rectors Parayil and Takeuchi met with the Japanese Minister of the Environment to discuss continued cooperation between the UNU and the Ministry of the Environment.

January 22 marked the centenary of the birth of U Thant who, in 1969 as UN Secretary-General, first proposed the creation of the United Nations University.

In November, the UNU and UNCCD signed a memorandum of understanding to combine resources aimed at tackling the mounting challenge of forced migration caused by desertification, land degradation and drought.

The UNU-ViE is helping to implement a project aimed at introducing e-learning into East African universities in the area of watershead management education.

The UNU’s Environmental Monitoring and Governance in the Asian Coastal Hydrosphere project was established 12 years ago with support from Japan’s Shimadzu Corp.

The vision of a nuclear weapon-free world was most famously dismissed by the former Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher, as a “pie in the sky.” Such was the derision which greeted the disarmament scenario championed by governments, especially from the Non-aligned Movement, as well as nongovernmental organizations such as Pugwash.