In the face of multiple crises of ecology, economy, and social equity, the question of how to democratically transform toward a more sustainable society is high on the political agenda as well as pertinent to academic research.
Human health and wellbeing and the health of the biosphere are inextricably linked. The state of Earth’s life-support systems, including freshwater, oceans, land, biodiversity, atmosphere, and climate, affect human health.
Superconducting links are an innovative solution for bulk power transmission, distinguished by their compact dimensions, high efficiency and small environmental footprint.
Changing mobility patterns combined with changes in the climate present challenges and opportunities for global health, requiring effective, relevant, and humane policy responses.
Energy efficiency measures and the deployment of renewable energy are commonly presented as two sides of the same coin—as necessary and synergistic measures to decarbonize energy systems and reach the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.
While the concept of ‘just transitions’ has become more and more prominent in academic and popular discussions of sustainability transition, these conceptions are often framed in purely economic terms, and focus on the economic impact on communiti
Purpose: This paper aims to increase related knowledge across personal, social and ecological dimensions of sustainability and how it can be applied to support transformative learning.
Die Vilmer Thesen 2017 beschäftigen sich zum einen mit historischen Bezügen von Musik zur deutschen Naturschutzbewegung sowie der Auseinandersetzung von Musikerinnen und Musikern mit Naturzerstörung.
As the international community rallies around Net-Zero emissions targets, there is increasing interest in the development of governance for Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs), a range of proposed approaches which involve removing greenhouse ga
Calls for more bicycle use have been heard from across the political spectrum in Germany for years. Nonetheless, policies that lead to a transition away from car use and toward the bicycle in urban mobility remain absent.
There is a dire need for deeper science‐policy engagement to face recent developments such as entering into the Anthropocene and our dependence as a species on technological and scientific advancements.
In the wake of digitalization it is increasingly debated whether developing countries can achieve economic prosperity through industrialization in the same manner as developed countries did.
The rapidly evolving ocean economy, driven by human needs for food, energy, transportation and recreation, has led to unprecedented pressures on the ocean that are further amplified by climate change, loss of biodiversity and pollution.
Future air quality will be driven by changes in air pollutant emissions, but also changes in climate. Here, we review the recent literature on future air quality scenarios and projected changes in effects on human health, crops and ecosystems.
The European Commission’s strategic long-term vision for 2050, “A Clean Planet for All”, identifies the bioeconomy and the circular economy as key strategic areas for achieving a climate-neutral economy.
How do emerging powers gain inclusion into club institutions, i.e. institutions with selective memberships that deliberately seek to avoid universality?
A recent article in this journal claimed to assess the socio-technical potential for onshore wind energy in Europe. We find the article to be severely flawed and raise concerns in five general areas.
International authorities are increasingly recognizing that utilizing the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from various industries can assist strategies for mitigating climate change.
The environmental crisis due to air pollution, high CO2 emissions, noise from traffic and soil ceiling requires profound changes to the car-dependent transport system.
Urgent and ambitious climate action is required to avoid catastrophic climate change and consequent health impacts. Political will is a critical component of the ambitious climate action equation.
An era (2005–2015) centered around the Copenhagen Accord saw the rise of several immature sociotechnical strategies currently at play: carbon capture and storage, REDD+, next-generation biofuels, shale gas, short-lived climate pollutants, carbon d
We perform a source attribution for tropospheric and ground-level ozone using a novel technique that accounts separately for the contributions of the two chemically distinct emitted precursors (reactive carbon and oxides of nitrogen) to the chemic
The European potential for renewable electricity is sufficient to enable fully renewable supply on different scales, from self-sufficient, subnational regions to an interconnected continent.
Risk governance has in recent years become a commonly used concept in relation to the understanding, assessment, management and communication of risk or risk problems, including so-called systemic risks.
The implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is indispensable for building a sustainable and just future for all humans and our planet. The SDGs are global goals.
Die Folgen der Pandemie haben schnelles Handeln gefordert und gleichzeitig auch Transformationen in kürzester Zeit ermöglicht. Insbesondere die Digitalisierung ist in einer nicht für möglich gehaltenen Geschwindigkeit vorangeschritten.
The urgent and critical challenges of transforming patterns of behavior from current unsustainable ones are encapsulated in the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
While calls for cross-sectoral collaboration have become a recurrent motif in sustainability-oriented policymaking and research, the practical realization of such processes presents significant challenges.
This paper is an ethnographic essay based on the work experience of one of the authors (da Costa) inside the environmental department of an electric energy producer corporation, between 2010 and 2013, period during which he was part of the technic
The COVID-19 outbreak was neither unpredictable nor unforeseen, yet it blind-sided policymakers when it emerged, leading to unprecedented global restrictions on human activity and almost certainly triggering the first global economic contraction s
Until very recently, governments of many countries, as well as their supporting organizations, have primarily addressed the biological, technical and economic aspects of aquaculture.
Aerosol radiative properties using recently available high-quality columnar aerosol data collected at several AERONET sites in South Asia, with a focus on pollution outflow from continental South Asia observed over Hanimaadhoo in Maldives, a small
Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) inversions for estimating natural carbon fluxes typically do not allow for adjustment of fossil fuel CO2 emissions, despite significant uncertainties in emission inventories and inadequacies in the specification of
In order to advance ongoing efforts in the (still emerging) field of marine restoration, different forms of knowledge must be combined: not only the biological and technical aspects, but also the social and cultural dimensions of marine restoratio
The commission of experts set up by the German government in June 2018 to deal with the coal phase-out and the associated structural change attracted enormous public interest.
With the increasing use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in industrial production, the risks and opportunities of these technologies for environmental sustainability as well as political awareness about these risks and opportun
Würde Zukunft öfter im Plural gedacht, müsste er für
die Städte stehen. Denn dort war Zukunft schon
immer divers, wurde zwischen Politik und Bürgerschaft
ausgehandelt.
In this perspectives piece, an interdisciplinary team of social science researchers considers the implications of Covid-19 for the politics of sustainable energy transitions.
Technological and policy solutions for transitioning to a fossil-free society exist, many countries could afford the transition, and rational arguments for rapid climate action abound. Yet effective action is still lacking.
The idea that universities should become entrepreneurial, commercialized, private commodities or should serve politicians and governmental agencies has been promoted by the university–industry–government relationship-based Triple Helix approach an
This article explores the role of energy in regionalization processes, assessing the case of natural gas finds in the Eastern Mediterranean (East Med). It makes three observations.
To tackle the plastic problem, the worldwide campaign ‘Plastic Free July’ aims at encouraging people to reduce single-use plastics during the month of July.
Climate change has become a major political concern for many people. There has been a lot of talk and no lack of calls for action. But to what extent does the world, and particularly Europe, also do the walking?
Understanding the physical and biogeochemical interactions and feedbacks between the ocean and atmosphere is a vital component of environmental and Earth system research.
In the moment of preparation of this paper, the world is still globally in grip of the Corona (COVID-19) crisis, and the need to understand the broader overall framework of the crisis increases.
Based on an extensive synthesis of semi-structured interviews, media content analysis, and reviews, this article conducts a qualitative meta-analysis of more than 560 sources of evidence to identify 38 visions associated with seven different low-c
Although radiation protection is challenged by many uncertainties, there is no systematic study investigating the definitions and types of these uncertainties.
Not only is the climate changing, but so is global climate governance. Climate policy initiatives have proliferated within and beyond the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) regime in a polycentric pattern.
Decarbonising heating supply is an important part of the global energy transition, and a vital step towards mitigating climate change. We analyse the transformative potential of German and UK heating sector decarbonisation policies.
We present a Strengths, Vulnerability, and Intervention Assessment related to Digital Threats (SVIDT) method, which provides a problem structuring and decision support for organizational vulnerability and resilience management with respect to chan
This study argues from a sociology of knowledge perspective which considers implicit knowledge as the basis for orientation towards a certain topic. Reconstructing this type of knowledge can help to better understand the learner’s perspective.
The Kathmandu Valley in Nepal is a bowl-shaped urban basin that experiences severe air pollution that poses health risks to its 3.5 million inhabitants.
Der Einfluss der Digitalisierung auf Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft ist omnipräsent und kann nicht losgelöst von der Debatte zur nachhaltigen Entwicklung betrachtet werden.
A multi-scale modelling system was developed to provide hourly NOx concentration fields at a building-resolving scale in the urban area of Modena, a city in the middle of the Po Valley (Italy), one of the most polluted areas in Europe.
Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCU) is an emerging technology field that can replace fossil carbon value chains, and that has a significant potential to achieve emissions mitigation or even “negative emissions”—however in many cases with challeng
“Access and allocation” is one of the five analytical problems identified as key for analysing earth system governance in the first Earth System Governance Science and Implementation Plan officially published in 2009.
Der vorliegende Text verortet Nachhaltigkeit und Klimaschutz knapp in ihrem historischen Kontext und macht ihre aufeinander bezogene Entwicklung deutlich.
In demokratischen Gesellschaften sind weitreichende Politikmaßnahmen wie zur Energiewende oder zum Klimaschutz auf eine breite Legitimation im politischen Raum angewiesen.
Es sind die Beziehungen zu uns selbst, Anderen und unserem Kontext, die bestimmen, ob sich das Gesamtsystem in einen gesunden oder ungesunden Zustand entwickelt.
While the idea of extracting deep-seabed resources dates back to as early as the 1960s, it remained pure fiction for decades due to limited technical possibilities and prohibitive costs.
Eco-efficiency enhancement is an inherent requirement of green development and an important indicator of high-quality development in general. It aims to achieve the coordinated development of nature, the economy, and society.
This study, based on new and high quality in situ observations, quantifies for the first time, the individual contributions of light-absorbing aerosols (black carbon (BC), brown carbon (BrC) and dust) to aerosol absorption over the Indo-Gangetic P
Learning rates are a central concept in energy system models and integrated assessment models, as they allow researchers to project the future costs of new technologies and to optimize energy system costs.
This forum contribution explains how analyzing the creation, distribution, and destruction of contemporary credit money is placed centre stage in the emerging field of critical macro-finance.
The seasonal aerosol radiative forcing efficiency (ARFE) in the atmosphere was found high (>100 Wm-2) and consistent throughout the year over Dusanbe, the capital city of Tajikistan in central Asia.
This study reports comprehensive analysis of seasonal and inter-annual variations of aerosol properties (optical, physical and chemical) and radiative effects over Pokhara Valley in the foothills of central Himalayas in Nepal utilizing the high-qu
