In a ceremony that takes place this Wednesday (1), at 17 pm, in a virtual meeting, representatives of the HIDS Founding Advisory Board sign the Agreement for the Creation of the International Hub for Sustainable Development. The Agreement is an umbrella agreement (without investments and financial costs) between the 14 institutions that form the HIDS Advisory Council, and may include bilateral, trilateral or multilateral agreements between them.
The signing of this Agreement formalizes the existence of HIDS. “This is a fundamental milestone for establishing the foundations that will allow this virtuous and long-term project to be implemented by future managements that follow in each of the institutions that make up HIDS”, said professor Marco Aurélio Pinheiro Lima, who coordinates HIDS at Unicamp.
HIDS is being designed to act as a complex of living laboratories, with the intention of becoming an international model of a smart and sustainable district (in its broadest sense). A living laboratory is based on a concept of open innovation, co-creation, integrating research and innovation processes within a context of public-private partnerships and operating in “real-life” environments/territories and communities. This approach allows evaluating the performance of a product/technology based on its potential adoption by users in a given territory and making projections for its adoption in global terms.
In this sense, HIDS can serve as a testing ground for technologies and/or products that help meet the UN's 17 SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), with strong potential for specific orders from governments at different levels. Some examples of applications that are already being built are: water, energy, food cycle, biodiversity, security without walls, health and well-being, sustainability assessment, human rights, zero waste, among others, mediated by a management platform of data.
To put this model into practice, it will be essential to mobilize the other institutions of the HIDS Advisory Council in order to create partnerships and synergies, as well as attract other partners interested in developing technologies in the living laboratory approach. The Agreement for the Creation of the International Hub for Sustainable Development will be fundamental to this.
About HIDS - HIDS recovers part of the premises in force in the creation of the science and technology hub in Campinas, but goes beyond the objective of leveraging the region's vocation for science and technology. Its purpose is to create a model district of sustainable and smart urban development in the form of a living laboratory. Its mission is to contribute to the process of sustainable development, combining national and international efforts to produce knowledge, innovative technologies and education for future generations, mitigating and overcoming the social, economic and environmental weaknesses of contemporary society.
The Hub's planning area involves the campuses of Unicamp (including Fazenda Argentina, with 1,4 million m2, adjacent to the University campus, in the District of Barão Geraldo), PUC-Campinas and Facamp, and also the entire territory of Ciatec II – High Technology Hub with 8,8 million square meters, totaling 11,3 million m2. The Ciatec II region is identified as a Strategic Development Hub in the municipality of Campinas, where cutting-edge companies and research institutions are present, such as CNPEM, CPQD, the Eldorado Institute and Cargill's Latin America Innovation Center.
