Sustaining our Planet's Water Resources: An Asia Pacific Perspective of SDG6

John Joseph Puthenkalam, Ph.D., is a Professor of Economics, at the Faculty of Economics, & Professor, at the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan. He serves as a Board Member of the Sophia School Corporation since 2016. He was also Academic Dean of the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies: 2015-2017. After obtaining Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Economics, Philosophy and Theology in India and Japan, he obtained Ph.D. in Economics, from the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom in 1996. He was awarded First Rank in M.A. (1984). He also won The Straniak Foundation Philosophy Prize, Switzerland in 1993 and 1998 and  Senior Fellowship, at the University of Bonn, Germany, 2001. He has published many books and articles in his area of specialization on Economic Growth & Sustainable Development Goals. In 2025. He has co-edited and published SDG 4 (Education) by Emerald Publications (UK), Terra Thrive: Achieving SDG 15: Life on Land for Future Generations, Springer Nature Switzerland.

 

Suma Sarojini, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Life Sciences and PhD Coordinator, School of Sciences, CHRIST University, Bangalore holds a PhD in Biotechnology from Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology, a DBT research institute. She has more than 70 research and review articles in peer reviewed journals, 12 book chapters and 2 patents to her credit. Her research domains include environmental and microbial biotechnology. She is also passionate about a sustainable environment. She has collaborations with a Canadian NGO in a project MAPS (Marine Arctic Peace Sanctuary), intended to save the Arctic region from extensive commercialization and has conducted petition signature drives and talks and written newspaper articles on this domain. She has been nominated as one of the global MAPS ambassadors by the NGO to propagate the cause of saving the Arctic and getting more public attention for the same. She is also the reviewer of many Scopus indexed journals. 

 

Dr Guangwei Huang, Ph.D., Professor at Sophia University, Japan, currently serves as the Dean of the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies. He received BSc from Fudan University, China, Master and Doctoral degrees from the University of Tokyo. With a long-standing passion for water-related research, his academic work has evolved from fluid dynamics to water quality modeling and monitoring, and further into integrated watershed science and management. In recent years, his research has focused on sustainability science from a water perspective, with particular emphasis on wetland conservation and wise use and flood vulnerability and resilience analysis. In this context, he employs water as a nexus, linking the three pillars of sustainability. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in leading academic journals, including Nature Communications. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Global Environmental Issues. In 2019, he received an award of distinguished scientist from International Society for Environmental Information Sciences (ISEIS).