Community Resilience and One Health with Green SIM
The Interview with Domenico Vito
Domenico Vito è ingegnere e dottore di ricerca, si occupa di progetti europei sulla qualità dell’aria nel Nord Italia e svolge attività di ricerca nell’ambito del metabolismo urbano. Osservatore dei negoziati climatici internazionali dal 2015, è fondatore dell’Osservatorio Parigi, piattaforma di monitoraggio e analisi dei negoziati multilaterali sul clima, nata per offrire strumenti di lettura, approfondimento e divulgazione sui processi UNFCCC e sulle loro ricadute in Europa e in Italia. Affianca all’attività di ricerca un costante impegno nella divulgazione scientifica e nell’organizzazione di iniziative pubbliche dedicate al cambiamento climatico e alla resilienza urbana.
With your lecture, our free Advanced Green Training course Social Impact Manager got underway, entering into the heart of the Introduction to Sustainable Development module. What are your impressions at the end of this first lesson of the course?
The program is an excellent initiative. I saw a class that was very “on point.” I have often given lectures similar in content in contexts where, however, such a high level of preparation was lacking. This course, on the other hand, has as its audience people who already have a good “arrival” level; in fact, we covered more technical topics and in greater depth. I feel I can say that it is a good class.
In an interview given to Radio Radicale in 2021, you stated “(we young people) want to decide on our future.” Do you believe that the initiative of the free Advanced Training course Green Social Impact Manager can represent an affirmative response to this invitation of yours?
Young people can decide on their own future if they are informed and trained. With lessons like today’s, young people can understand the world before them and analyze reality critically. Without critical thinking cultivated by training and educational systems, the decision is not one’s own, is not perceived, and is not even right, because the appropriate tools are lacking; there is a risk of being manipulated. In this sense, the course, in my opinion, goes in the direction of reducing the likelihood of manipulation and therefore leading young people to decide for themselves.
Last year, we as Fondazione Augurusa also participated in COP 30 in Belém, which saw the active participation of various nonprofit organizations, more numerous than ever before. By virtue of your extensive experience, gained as an observer at the Conference of the Parties since 2015, what do you believe the role of nonprofit organizations can be in facilitating the achievement of the Conference’s objectives and, more generally, the fight against climate change?
The role can be to localize the elements of international agendas and global responses to climate change decided during COPs. COPs and National Plans can only create “enabling spaces,” that is, frameworks for action so that civil society actors can implement and act concretely toward the objectives. Any policy or plan without participation and activation of civil society, of which nonprofit organizations are part, is an incomplete plan. I therefore think that this is the role and opportunity that NGOs can have in the fight against climate change.
You work on One Health and community resilience: how much is an organization like Fondazione Augurusa needed today to transform major global challenges into concrete and lasting impacts on territories?
Organizations like the Foundation can truly help the entire ecosystem and the entire social and educational fabric to implement frameworks and concepts such as those of One Health and community resilience, in the role of “implementation catalysts.”
In light of your work on the themes of One Health and climate transition, how strategic can a collaboration with Fondazione Augurusa be, which invests in training, territory, and transforming young people into agents of change?
I believe it is essential and is also very welcome. Personally, I am very pleased to have had this opportunity to collaborate, precisely because, without a territorial application and without an application toward future generations, therefore without localization and future generations, we cannot speak of sustainability, we cannot speak of regenerative economy, we cannot speak of all these concepts that are often boasted about, but which then must be implemented. I think that work like that of the Foundation is essential for this work of concrete long-term implementation. I will say one last thing without rhetoric. I think—because it was for me and it was also for my colleagues—that taking courses like these then also guides life choices. Having the occasion and opportunity to meet with professionals, with experts in the field, truly changes one’s life: it gives you information and tangible proof of what can be done, of what existing professions there are. In the new generations, these encounters truly have strategic importance at the level of life path, which we often underestimate and which are instead key elements.
