Welcome to our Intern, Anna Blome!

It takes a lot of dedication to be an ERASMUS+ intern these days. First of all you have to make the decision whether or not to travel to a foreign country, where you know nobody, in the uncertain times during a global pandemic. Second of all, when you make that decision, you have to isolate and quarantine yourself for 10 days in a 1-room «apartment» with a shared bathroom and kitchen.

Such was the start of Anna’s internship with the #LoVeSeSDG project. And it’s been a bit of a roller coaster ride with a sharp upturn after the initial quarantine, moving into the extra desk in Dorothy’s office at BIO (Dept of Biological Sciences) at University of Bergen Marineholmen campus and first interactions with the #LoVSeSDG «lab» with Jessica, PhD candidate. Jessica and Anna even bought plane tickets and rented an apartment on Airbnb in Andenes in Vesterålen for the next round of fieldwork. Things were on the up and up!

But when the new wave hit Bergen in November 2020, the nose of the rollercoaster started pointing down again…plane tickets cancelled and back in the «home office» 1-room student-housing simplicity.

Luckily, the social science fieldwork was able to be rescheduled to a digital format. And now, after a week of stakeholder interviews with folks in Andøya, Anna is starting to get some meat on the bone. Here is a picture from her weekly supervisor meeting with Dorothy, with her showing her notes on SDG Target reports from the national level, and the knowledge gaps in the local reporting.

Anna is also currently designing the method of «SDG Relevance Tracing» to be performed in digital workshops with stakeholders from Andøya. Hopefully these workshops will occur before Christmas.

So congratulations to Anna, first for her determination and second for the fruit that her internship is starting to bear!

 

Anna Blome

Ocean Sustainability Bergen Conference 2020

The second annual Ocean Sustainability Bergen conference went hybrid this year, and I got to present work from our #LoVeSeSDG project in the «From Pins to Action» panel. University Aula and gave a 5 minute

presentation on the on-going work in the #LoVeSeSDG project. For us locals in Bergen, it was a real pleasure to work with our producer, Irmelin Grønevik, and her stellar team @ Bergen Live! Dag Rune Olsen, our Vice-Chancellor @ UiB who opened the conference even remarked that he sees Irmelin more often than any other colleague in these digital communication days on campus! I also enjoyed hearing Per Grieg, Jr. of Grieg Seafood underscore their commitment to the SDG. But perhaps his message that researchers need

to do a more pro-active job to communicate their research to policymakers is the one I liked the best.

Check out the tweets to #OSB2020 here: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23osb2020&src=typed_query

And here are some backstage photos I took to get the feel of the production set-up by Bergen Live!
 

The Main message of my own talk was that we must harness the detail of the SDG Targets in order to capitalize on local SDG reporting: There are on-going activities in communities that already are doing some of the grunt-work described in the SDG Targets. But we have to link these activities TO the targets. This is what my students Jessica Fuller and Anna Blome are currently  doing in their work in the #LoVeSeSDG project through interviews and workshops with stakeholders in Andøy Kommune in Vesterålen, Northern Norway.

My talk can be seen at this link (fast forward to 2.54): https://stream.mux.com/4L01qkFnPuIBUX9VjtoZ4NB9N8ZG6hiT2/high.mp4

And check out the backstage video I took at the very end of the conference: https://youtu.be/kWVXGOgaKLM

 

#LoVeSeSDG Svolvær Workshop

The #LoVeSeSDG team is in the field in Lofoten and Vesterålen this week for project work. Today we had a successful workshop with the Institute of Marine Research (Mette Skern-Mauritzen), Nordland Fylkeskommune (Silje Charlotta Wästlund) and SALT (Brita Staal, and other close colleagues including our adopted new mascot, Nansen the most handsome Portuguese water dog in Svolvær 😉