ISEPEI (In-Service ICT Training for Environmental Professionals) started as a joint project of UNEP's Global Universities Partnership on Environment and Sustainability (GUPES) and CEU with seed financing from UNEP and AGEDI, and has been conducting a series of environmental professional education events since 2014. The associated workshops are run under the organizational framework of the CEU Summer University.
This summer is different in many ways. Our traditional week-long ISEPEI workshops as well as newly introduced short intensive weekend trainings, taking place in June/July in Budapest, had to be postponed to October 2020.
Instead, on June 22-28 we organized a series of one-hour long webinars, entitled “Bridging ICTs and the Environment”. These free and open events introduced the topics to be further explored in more detail during our postponed in-residence workshops. The webinars featured presentations by ISEPEI’s traditional and new partners, key global stakeholders in data-driven decision-making in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), Water Security and other SDG-relevant issues: UNFPA, UNDP, GEO, WorldBank/GEF, European Union Satellite Centre, Google, IMMAP, ITC. With more than 600 attendees registered, the presentations covered the global DRR system and Sendai Framework, various applications of Earth Observation data for monitoring and decision making, selected innovations in geospatial technologies. The workshop series was followed by short practical trainings targeted at professional groups associated with ISEPEI partners.
We are still discussing with our partners the dates for our face-to-face workshops this autumn. The core courses (“Geospatial Technologies for Monitoring Water- and Health-related SDGs” and the "Innovations in Disaster and Climate Risk Reduction") and the ISEPEI-SUN Weekend Workshops, are tentatively rescheduled to 17-31 October 2020. More information on these events will be published on our websites later this summer. To stay updated on these and other events, sign up for our mailing list (http://isepei.org/Subscribe).
CEU Syslab and ISEPEI would like to thank everyone who took part in our webinars and many organizations that contributed to the events. We hope that this autumn we will be able to get together in Budapest once again for our in-residence ISEPEI workshops.