On friday 7 march 2025, my friend and colleague Isak Stoddard defended his PhD thesis Perilous times: Carbon budgets and the cosmopolitics of climate mitigation at Uppsala University. Below is the abstract in english from https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1929133&dswid=519. Increasingly emphatic warnings from scientists about the dire consequences of global climate change has contributed to the establishment of [...]
One unsustainable part of the industrial economy is the mining and processing of materials and fuels which creates also large flows of ‘waste’ and burdens environmental sinks. Upstream, huge amounts of solid waste are generated in mining and processing processes. One-fifth (2%) of global energy- and process-related CO2 emissions arise from the production and processing [...]
The aspiration of Sustainable Development (SD) is associated with well-being for life on Earth and in the long term (de Vries 2023). It is often narrowed down to human happiness, in which the long term is only involved inasfar as people’s well-being is influenced by expectations and emotions about the longer term prospects for themselves, [...]
Angkur Pailiwal and Jyotika Sood tell an interesting story about the rapidly increasing demand for guar gum for use in the exploitation of shale gas (‘frackgas’) in Down to Earth . It shows the interconnectedness in the world: oil depletion and geopolitical tensions cause investments in exploiting marginal gas deposits in the USA, which increases the [...]
Needs is a broad category. It overlaps with wants and desires. It covers a broad array of items, from basic needs for food and shelter to spiritual aspirations. How needs are perceived and actualized is a key aspect of the quest for sustainable development. The goal of sustainable development is a quest for developing and [...]
Resource overexploitation may have been around from the earliest times. There is evidence that early 9th millennium BP villages collapsed around 8500 BP, while new settlements were founded in quite variable landscapes in the same period. One of the largest, over 12 ha in size, was Ain Ghazal in southern Jordan (Rollefson 1992; Redman 1999:107-110). [...]
“If… the ‘services’ of a landlord or hedge fund manager are treated as productive, they magically become part of GDP.” (Mazzucato 2018:97). SDG10 and the Financial System One of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is number 10: Reduce inequality within and between countries. Like many other SDGs, it is ambitious and ambiguous. Is there an [...]
What is waste? A friend once took me to the urban waste treatment plant in Kolkata and I had the strange experience of looking into the stomach and intestines of a huge organism. Across an enormous field, human beings were processing from the right to the left the urban garbage stream in a kind of digestive [...]
In the book Sustainability Science, I have argued that the location of sustainability is in the center of worldview space, where the balance is found between individual and collective and between material and immaterial (§6.3). The notion of two opposite forces in dynamic equilibrium provides an ingenious description of what is called worldview dynamics in [...]
Can you please stop telling me 'all people are different'? A textbook on sustainable development should address public decision making and politics. Politics can be described as the area in society where issues transcending mere individual needs and activities are debated and decided and where disagreement is legitimate. It has its own rules and rites. [...]