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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2024-04-25
A sustainable future requires broader time perspectives
How will our actions today affect future generations? What would the effect be if we looked not just 50 or 100, but millions of years ahead? And what role does history play in creating a sustainable future? Researchers and practitioners from different subjects and fields of practice gathered at Karlstad University for a 2-day conference to discuss and consider sustainability from different perspectives and in really long-term trajectories.
Time is an important aspect in order to understand what makes societies sustainable as well as unsustainable. During the conference The Temporality of Sustainability, a wide range of issues related to sustainability were discussed, from the challenges of green transition in industry to social sustainability in terms of free-time activities on equal terms. From the individual’s actions in relation to climate change in the present, to how long geological processes can be detected in the landscape.
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2023-11-30
Speaking the language of tipping points
Avit Bhowmik, Assistant Professor in Risk and Environmental Studies, who is going to attend COP28 in Dubai, which starts today, reflects on the SB meeting in Bonn.
The annual Conference of Parties (COP) 28 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that will be hosted by Dubai is knocking at the door. Almost everyone who keeps an eye on climate change policy at the global level is by now familiar with COPs. It’s held every November or December and on a different continent each year.
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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.