Centre for Research on Sustainable Societal Transformation
New knowledge about sustainable transformation in society
Centre for Research on Sustainable Societal Transformation
New knowledge about sustainable transformation in society
Centre for Research on Sustainable Societal Transformation
New knowledge about sustainable transformation in society
News
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2023-03-30
When animals become food - why we fall for the myth of the happy cow
Cows grazing on a green field under a blue sky. Healthy pigs rooting around in the mud. Chickens in the springtime sunshine. We are surrounded by romanticised images and stories of animals raised for food. But it is both difficult and complicated to ensure ethical animal husbandry within the financial and practical confines of reality. In her doctoral thesis, “How do animals become food? A critical study of ethical animal production in Swedish organic organizations”, Josefin Velander shows us the flipside and how the consumption of animals is not just about individual choice, but very much also a social and political issue.
Swedish meat consumption has long been at record levels, although it has been declining for the past five years. Animals raised for food production are often invisible in the discussions about the consumption of meat and animals. The focus is on what, but rarely who, is eaten. Since very few people have daily contact with the animals that are made into food, the general public’s perception is crafted by special interest and industry groups. That enables the power structure in which humans are entitled to eat animals.
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2023-03-22
Climate action by all, for all
The IPCC sixth assessment synthesis report summary for policymakers was approved yesterday and officially released today. For the very first time, IPCC explicitly recognized and emphasized the role of diverse non-state and subnational actors, and transdisciplinary climate action.
Starting at the very first page of the synthesis report, the importance of distributed and diverse climate action projects and multilevel and polycentric climate governance for sustaining the reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions was highlighted throughout the report and particularly in section 14.5.
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2023-01-09
Impressions from COP27
The climate change conference COP27 took place 6-18 of November 2022 in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt. Avit Bhowmik, research director at CRS and researcher in Risk and Environmental Studies at Karlstad University, was one of the participants.
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2022-11-10
The Climate Long Game: An urgent call for an action research agenda
In a recently published perspective article in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers put forward an agenda for integrated climate catastrophe assessment, emphasizing the need for in-depth understanding of climate change induced mass human mortality and even extinction.
In a commentary article published in the same journal, Research Director of Centre for Research on Sustainable Societal Transformation and Assistant Professor of Risk and Environmental Studies Avit Bhowmik raises concern that such a research agenda risks portraying climate change as unsolvable and inevitable, and may trigger fear, hopelessness and inaction.
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2022-05-02
Why Mangroves are declining globally
Mangroves can thrive in harsh environment and are used to natural perturbations like tropical cyclones. But, with several confounding pressures exacerbating each other, mangroves fail to withstand and diminish.
Mangroves, the coastal cousins of the inland forests, do not only represent a unique set of rich biodiversity but also provide important livelihoods, coastal defence, and carbon sinks. Yet despite their critical importance, mangrove forests sized the entire Tokyo city (8,600 km2) disappeared during the last three decades. South and Southeast Asian region encountered the highest loss with Indonesia topping the countries.
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2022-04-22
Exponential climate action by diverse actors is key
Researchers Avit Bhowmik and Sol Agin comment on the latest report from The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
For the very first time, IPCC explicitly recognized and emphasized the role of diverse non-state and subnational actors in climate action. Starting at the very first page of the report, the importance of distributed and diverse climate action projects and multilevel and polycentric climate governance for sustaining the reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions was highlighted throughout the report and particularly in section 14.5.