Can sustainability be achieved through technological developments alone? How can transformations towards sustainability be shaped in the face of escalating crises and conflicts?
Social-ecological transformations change societal ways of living and doing business and thus the relationships between society and nature. While more and more people in civil society, business, administration and politics are committed to sustainability, conflicts and resistance are growing at the same time, especially when people’s own way of life, working environment or company is affected.
Crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and the associated economic upheavals and social tensions have stoked fears: many people fear not only the consequences of global warming or biodiversity loss but also see their economic and social situation threatened – by rising living costs, an increasingly multi-ethnic society, and interventions in their personal housing, working and mobility habits.
To preserve the foundations of life in the long term and to enable a good life for everyone within planetary boundaries in the future, far-reaching transformations are necessary. They must be shaped in a socially just way and correct existing inequalities.
“Transformations toward sustainability must be tested and reflected upon, enabling social learning. To achieve this, we need new spaces for learning and experience.”
Prof. Dr. Flurina Schneider, Scientific Director
With our transdisciplinary research, we develop new ideas and approaches for shaping social-ecological transformations towards sustainability. These do justice to the urgency and the complex interactions of social-ecological crises. They also take into account the scope for action of different societal actors and create conditions for a fair distribution of benefits and burdens.
We analyse the causes and effects of transformation conflicts in the areas of water, land and biodiversity as well as urban development, mobility and consumption, and show how conflicts can be addressed constructively. We also examine barriers and conditions for success of transformations in order to learn from experience. This concerns, for example, social innovations such as post-fossil mobility cultures or the redesign of technical infrastructure systems.
Finally, we look at the relationship between science and society, because science, too, must change if it wants to produce knowledge that can have societal impact.
Artificial cooling fundamentally shapes the world we live in. Cooling and freezing technologies have become indispensable for a wide range of everyday practices. The project explores the cultural foundations of global cooling infrastructure and its impacts.
