World Sustainable Development Summit

UNSW SMaRT Centre Director Prof Veena Sahajwalla will be a key speaker at the World Sustainable Development Summit in India on 26 February 2026.

Veena will join a session entitled Greening Manufacturing and Trade, joining global leaders exploring how green manufacturing and sustainable trade can reshape global value chains. 

The session will examine pathways for the Indo-Pacific to lead equitable transitions through innovation, circularity, and resilient industrial ecosystems.

Event website

Veena will share the SMaRT Centre vision for a sustainable future, highlighting the importance of creating a circular economy and how using waste as a resource must be at the centre of our manufacturing future and innovative decarbonisation efforts, in collaboration between researchers and industry.

She will highlight that using innovations such as UNSW SMaRT Centre's recycling and MICROfactorie^TM technologies that recover valuable materials from waste and reform them into new manufacturing feedstock and products through collaborators, are central to help achieve the sustainability needed for the future.

She will reveal that green manufacturing is crucial if we are to create viable sustainability for our materials and develop functioning circular economies.

"Creating materials circularity – where we use innovative recycling technologies to recover from waste valuable materials to be used for feedstock for remanufacturing and new products – is often overlooked in the wider sustainability and decarbonisation narratives. But in addition to global markets, we need localised markets based on local circular economies. This helps overcome global issues – think tariffs and geopolitical risks – so supply chains can flow from local resources derived from waste."

Organisers say about the event:

The World Sustainable Development Summit (WSDS) is the annual flagship multistakeholder convening organized by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). Instituted in 2001, the Summit series has a legacy of over two decades in making ‘sustainable development’ a globally shared goal. Over the years, the Summit platform has brought together thought leaders, heads of state and government, scholars, corporates, youth groups, and civil society representatives from across the world. The Summit series has established itself as a responsible and effective platform for mobilizing opinion-makers to drive ambition and advance pioneering actions to address some of the most pressing issues concerning sustainable development and climate change.

As the only independently convened international summit on sustainable development and the environment based in the Global South, WSDS strives to provide long-term solutions for the benefit of global communities by assembling the world’s most enlightened leaders and thinkers on a single platform. In its previous editions, it has involved speakers, delegates, and participants in addressing several key issues pertaining to climate change and environmental protection. As a result, the Summit has witnessed numerous partnerships that have promised to strengthen our collective endeavours towards imagining a sustainable and environmentally secure future.

The platform has reached out to the global community through features such as High-level Ministerial Sessions, Plenary Sessions, Thematic Tracks, the Youth Plenary, the Women Leadership Session, International Dialogues, the CEO Forum, Colloquiums, and various exhibitions on clean and green innovations. Since its inception, WSDS has convened 59 Heads of State and Government, 149 Ministers, 13 Nobel Laureates, 2,158 Business Leaders, 3,730 Speakers, and more than 41,000 Delegates representing a diverse base of ecosystem actors from around the globe.

TERI launched the Act4Earth initiative at the 21st edition of WSDS, focusing on climate action and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The two components of Act4Earth include the COP30 Compass and the SDG Charter. The Summit series aims to extend its reach through closer engagement with stakeholders to collectively advance policy research and dialogue through the Act4Earth initiative.