Top minds gather to tackle global issues at Geopolitical Summit

The challenges facing the global community are not small: world poverty, health care coverage amid vast disparities, and global environmental sustainability in the 21^st century. To address these issues, FIU’s second Geopolitical Summit, which took place Oct. 18-19, gathered some of the world’s foremost minds for a forum that fostered dialogue and proposed solutions to these problems in the context of globalization.

“The scope and level of expertise at this year’s summit brought to the FIU campuses is a testament to the commitment this university has to tackle the world’s problems,” said FIU Provost Douglas Wartzok. In addition to welcome remarks from President Mark B. Rosenberg, each plenary also had a panel of FIU professors facilitating open discourse and audience engagement regarding these complex international issues.

Panelists listen to Oxford University scholar Paul Collier

Oxford University professor of economics and world poverty expert Paul Collier challenged the global community to rethink how we view and address the world’s poorest countries, referencing research from his book The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What can be Done About it.

Noting shared characteristics among the populations – such as recent civil conflict, rich natural resources yet a poor economy, and landlocked geographic status – Collier proposed changes to aid and trade policies, improved security strategies, better international charters and a call to action by everyday citizens to get more involved. At the local level, Collier said the South Florida community needs to look no further than Haiti as a starting point.

On the complexities of health care reform and moving toward improved health outcomes, Len Nichols, health care economist and professor of health policy at George Mason University, called for a political consensus on the continued debate over how best to implement a national health care plan. In his plenary, titled Challenges to Health Care Reform in the U.S. and Beyond, Nichols, along with professors from the Herbert Wertheim School of Medicine, the College of Law and department of economics, discussed the necessity of instituting healthcare reform in light of likely legal challenge and strong partisan opinion.

Wrapping up the summit was environmental expert Bruce Babbitt, former Secretary of the Interior, former Governor of Arizona and environmental expert. Babbitt’s discussion was titled The Politics of the Spill: The Role of Science, Policy and Ethics in Shaping Environmental Policy Decisions. During the session, hosted by the School of Environment, Arts and Society at the Biscayne Bay Campus, Babbitt focused on sea level rise, especially as it relates to Florida, rather than addressing the oil spill.