Seminar: "Humanscapes: Thirty years of global progress towards inclusive sustainable development"

We are happy to announce that ICTA-UAb will host a seminar on Humanscapes by Matti Kummu, from Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland, and  Xander Huggins, from Princeton University, USA and the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Seminar: "Humanscapes: Thirty years of global progress towards inclusive sustainable development"

Speakers: 

Matti Kummu, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland

Xander Huggins, Princeton University, USA / University of British Columbia, Canada

• Date: Thursday, Februay 26th, 2026
• Time:  11.30h (CET)
• Venue: Sala Montseny (Z/022 & Z/023) ICTA-UAB 

Understanding to what degree global progress has been made towards sustainable development goals requires a comprehensive, multidimensional perspective. But we are faced with a critical shortage of subnational and gridded datasets regarding socio-economics, demography, and other human systems spanning the past several decades. We will present a new collection of global subnational indicator datasets that can be used to holistically understand changes within administrative areas between 1990 and 2021. Our analysis includes detailed mapping, clustering, and charting the trajectories of change between archetypes. This work contributes to the construction of an extensive database of human system variables to investigate their interlinkages with Earth system processes. 

Matti Kummu is a Professor at the Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland. The main focus of his research is the interaction between human population and earth system. He has been working extensively on assessing the global water scarcity and how it has impacted on food production and availability. To ease the ever-growing pressure on natural resources, they are working actively in deepening the understanding on global food system. Particularly, they are quantifying the potential of different measures, such as diet change, food loss reduction, emerging non-meat protein sources, and yield gap closure, to sustainably increase the food availability globally. Finally, they work also on a more local scale challenges and opportunities on water-energy-food nexus, particularly in Southeast Asian context. He's part of Water and development research group, under Water and Environmental Engineering group, of which Master's programme he teaches "Water and people in developing world"-course. 

Xander Huggins is a Killam, NSERC, and Canadian Space Agency Postdoctoral Fellow at IRES working with Mark Johnson. He is also a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University where he works with Simon Levin. Broadly, his work couples geospatial data science methods with social-ecological system frameworks and focuses on global groundwater science and sustainability topics. His research aims to foreground groundwater sustainability as a transformative process that can underpin broader goals of social well-being, ecological integrity, social and environmental justice, and Earth system stability. During his PhD at the University of Victoria and the Global Institute for Water Security, he developed the conceptual framing of groundwater-connected systems to center and better represent social-ecological system interactions with groundwater. Global-scale applications of the framing developed new landscape classes of groundwater systems, highlighted the role of groundwater in ecosystem protection, and identified global hotspots of freshwater change. At IRES, Xander is primarily working to evaluate the resilience of groundwater-dependent ecosystems to trends in groundwater storage across land use and policy contexts at the global scale. He also co-leads an international research collective on large-scale freshwater resilience.