| 1. |
- Bai, Xuemei, et al.
(författare)
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Translating Earth system boundaries for cities and businesses
- 2024
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Ingår i: Nature Sustainability. - 2398-9629. ; 7, s. 108-119
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Operating within safe and just Earth system boundaries requires mobilizing key actors across scale to set targets and take actions accordingly. Robust, transparent and fair cross-scale translation methods are essential to help navigate through the multiple steps of scientific and normative judgements in translation, with clear awareness of associated assumptions, bias and uncertainties. Here, through literature review and expert elicitation, we identify commonly used sharing approaches, illustrate ten principles of translation and present a protocol involving key building blocks and control steps in translation. We pay particular attention to businesses and cities, two understudied but critical actors to bring on board.
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| 2. |
- Figueres, Christiana, et al.
(författare)
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Three years to safeguard our climate
- 2017
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Ingår i: Nature. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0028-0836 .- 1476-4687. ; 546:7660, s. 593-595
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 3. |
- Green, Jonathan M. H., et al.
(författare)
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Research priorities for managing the impacts and dependencies of business upon food, energy, water and the environment
- 2017
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Ingår i: Sustainability Science. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1862-4065 .- 1862-4057. ; 12:2, s. 319-331
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Delivering access to sufficient food, energy and water resources to ensure human wellbeing is a major concern for governments worldwide. However, it is crucial to account for the 'nexus' of interactions between these natural resources and the consequent implications for human wellbeing. The private sector has a critical role in driving positive change towards more sustainable nexus management and could reap considerable benefits from collaboration with researchers to devise solutions to some of the foremost sustainability challenges of today. Yet opportunities are missed because the private sector is rarely involved in the formulation of deliverable research priorities. We convened senior research scientists and influential business leaders to collaboratively identify the top forty questions that, if answered, would best help companies understand and manage their food-energy-water-environment nexus dependencies and impacts. Codification of the top order nexus themes highlighted research priorities around development of pragmatic yet credible tools that allow businesses to incorporate nexus interactions into their decision-making; demonstration of the business case for more sustainable nexus management; identification of the most effective levers for behaviour change; and understanding incentives or circumstances that allow individuals and businesses to take a leadership stance. Greater investment in the complex but productive relations between the private sector and research community will create deeper and more meaningful collaboration and cooperation.
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| 4. |
- Vlasov, Maxim, 1991-
(författare)
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Ecological embedding : stories of back-to-the-land ecopreneurs and energy descent
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis starts with the premise that to address ecological and climate crises, we need to understand their psychological and cultural roots found in the separation of modern societies from the natural world. This separation permeates mainstream approaches to sustainability that either sustain business-as-usual of the unbridled economic growth, or reform it with greener markets and technologies. At the same time, there is an emerging interest in alternative transitional ecopreneurs who have a different relationship with the natural environment and an agency with potentially more radical consequences for societal change. I look at ecopreneurs within the contemporary back-to-the-land movement, asking the following question: How do ecopreneurs reconnect with the land, and what does this mean for degrowth?My exploration was grounded in a dialogue between the literature on degrowth, ecopreneurship, critical organisational studies, and ecological embeddedness; and the ethnographic study of eleven back-to-the-landers who started small-scale ecological farms and permaculture enterprises in Sweden. I adopted a critical, narrative, and ethnographic research approach. The empirical research consisted of two studies that relied on narrative interviews and deep observations. The result was four essays that together, with the help of stories of back-to-the-land ecopreneurs, develop a process theory of ecological embedding.Ecological embedding is a process by which an ecopreneur is becoming more rooted in the land that provides the ecological conditions for life and economic activity. This process may be catalysed by psychological suffering in modern societies – an inner revolt – with examples of burn-out from the “rat race”, experiential deprivation of the office work, and ecological anxiety. The way back-to-the-land ecopreneurs develop, nurture, and negotiate their physical, emotional and spiritual ties with the land shapes the ongoing sensemaking and organising that is central to the formation of their alternative livelihoods and enterprises. It is also established that ecological embedding requires physical and psychological work on behalf of the back-to-the-land ecopreneur who navigates the contested terrain between the mainstream economy and alternative degrowth futures.The overall contribution consists in using the voices of back-to-the-landers in order to present their everyday experiences and critical knowledges about ecological embedding and transitions to a society that lives within planetary boundaries. Back-to-the-landers practice alternative forms of ecopreneurship that depart from the discursive and material conditions of the modern growth economy, and that revolve around a different set of values and objectives such as a more grounded life, non-materialist conceptions of well-being, regenerative ethos, post-capitalist relations, conviviality, resilience, alternative food economies and forms of local development. It is important to recognise the critical role of this new generation of individuals and families who enter alternative agriculture based on environmental and lifestyle aspirations, and who work hard to realise these aspirations on a daily basis, in spite of immense personal challenges and systemic hurdles that come from lacking institutional and political support.If we take seriously the ecopsychological crises of the modern civilisation and growth capitalism, to reconnect with local ecologies and to creatively downscale our economies becomes crucial. And this is not going to be an easy task.
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| 5. |
- Warszawski, Lila, et al.
(författare)
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All options, not silver bullets, needed to limit global warming to 1.5 °C : a scenario appraisal
- 2021
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Ingår i: Environmental Research Letters. - : IOP Publishing. - 1748-9326. ; 16:6
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Climate science provides strong evidence of the necessity of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, in line with the Paris Climate Agreement. The IPCC 1.5 °C special report (SR1.5) presents 414 emissions scenarios modelled for the report, of which around 50 are classified as '1.5 °C scenarios', with no or low temperature overshoot. These emission scenarios differ in their reliance on individual mitigation levers, including reduction of global energy demand, decarbonisation of energy production, development of land-management systems, and the pace and scale of deploying carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies. The reliance of 1.5 °C scenarios on these levers needs to be critically assessed in light of the potentials of the relevant technologies and roll-out plans. We use a set of five parameters to bundle and characterise the mitigation levers employed in the SR1.5 1.5 °C scenarios. For each of these levers, we draw on the literature to define 'medium' and 'high' upper bounds that delineate between their 'reasonable', 'challenging' and 'speculative' use by mid century. We do not find any 1.5 °C scenarios that stay within all medium upper bounds on the five mitigation levers. Scenarios most frequently 'over use' CDR with geological storage as a mitigation lever, whilst reductions of energy demand and carbon intensity of energy production are 'over used' less frequently. If we allow mitigation levers to be employed up to our high upper bounds, we are left with 22 of the SR1.5 1.5 °C scenarios with no or low overshoot. The scenarios that fulfil these criteria are characterised by greater coverage of the available mitigation levers than those scenarios that exceed at least one of the high upper bounds. When excluding the two scenarios that exceed the SR1.5 carbon budget for limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, this subset of 1.5 °C scenarios shows a range of 15–22 Gt CO2 (16–22 Gt CO2 interquartile range) for emissions in 2030. For the year of reaching net zero CO2 emissions the range is 2039–2061 (2049–2057 interquartile range).
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| 6. |
- Whiteman, Gail, et al.
(författare)
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Planetary Boundaries : Ecological Foundations for Corporate Sustainability
- 2013
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Ingår i: Journal of Management Studies. - : Wiley. - 0022-2380 .- 1467-6486. ; 50:2, s. 307-336
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Management studies on corporate sustainability practices have grown considerably. The field now has significant knowledge of sustainability issues that are firm and industry focused. However, complex ecological problems are increasing, not decreasing. In this paper, we argue that it is time for corporate sustainability scholars to reconsider the ecological and systemic foundations for sustainability, and to integrate our work more closely with the natural sciences. To address this, our paper introduces a new development in the natural sciences the delineation of nine Planetary Boundaries' which govern life as we know it. We call for more systemic research that measures the impact of companies on boundary processes that are at, or possibly beyond, three threshold points climate change, the global nitrogen cycle, and rate of biodiversity loss and closing in on others. We also discuss practical implications of the Planetary Boundaries framework for corporate sustainability, including governance and institutional challenges.
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