The 3rd World Congress of Environmental History, held in Florianópolis, Brazil had the theme: “Convergences: The Global South and the Global North in the Era of Great Acceleration”. The short paper ...gives an overview of the rewards such congresses can bring. It specifically deals with the plenary talks by Robert Billot and Brigitte Baptiste, highlights the role of scholarly co-operation and makes a case for the opportunity offered by such congresses to review the environment of the hosting country, for which the plenary roundtables, the excursions, and field trips and comparative panels are referred to as examples. World congresses might have an environmental cost, but they do provide unique opportunities for scholarly exchange, in terms of themes, methods, conceptual approaches, and sources used. Behaving in an environmentally conscious way but at the same time enabling and fostering international and intergenerational exchange is a challenge that will have to be taken up in the future.
Sustainability science analyses society–nature interaction on a variety of spatial and temporal scales. By explaining the link between sustainability and socio-economic material and energy flows as ...well as with colonization of ecosystems, this paper introduces a conceptual framework for empirical applications featured in other contributions to this special issue. The paper discusses how the proposed material and energy flow accounting (MEFA) framework supports such analyses. This framework is an integrated toolbox to account for socio-economic metabolism and colonization of natural processes; above all, land use. We argue that, even though it is at present impossible to define precision sustainability thresholds with respect to many material and energy flows, the MEFA framework is a valuable tool because it tracks these flows in a consistent manner for regions of any scale over time.
From LTER to LTSER Haberl, Helmut; Winiwarter, Verena; Andersson, Krister ...
Ecology and society,
12/2006, Letnik:
11, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Concerns about global environmental change challenge long term ecological research (LTER) to go beyond traditional disciplinary scientific research to produce knowledge that can guide society toward ...more sustainable development. Reporting the outcomes of a 2 d interdisciplinary workshop, this article proposes novel concepts to substantially expand LTER by including the human dimension. We feel that such an integration warrants the insertion of a new letter in the acronym, changing it from LTER to LTSER, “Long-Term Socioecological Research,” with a focus on coupled socioecological systems. We discuss scientific challenges such as the necessity to link biophysical processes to governance and communication, the need to consider patterns and processes across several spatial and temporal scales, and the difficulties of combining data from in-situ measurements with statistical data, cadastral surveys, and soft knowledge from the humanities. We stress the importance of including prefossil fuel system baseline data as well as maintaining the often delicate balance between monitoring and predictive or explanatory modeling. Moreover, it is challenging to organize a continuous process of cross-fertilization between rich descriptive and causal-analytic local case studies and theory/modeling-oriented generalizations. Conceptual insights are used to derive conclusions for the design of infrastructures needed for long-term socioecological research.
Policy makers have made repeated calls for integration of human and natural sciences in the field of climate change. Serious multidisciplinary attempts began already in the 1950s. Progress has ...certainly been made in understanding the role of humans in the planetary system. New perspectives have clarified policy advice, and three insights are singled out in the paper: the critique of historicism, the distinction between benign and wicked problems, and the cultural critique of the ‘myths of nature’. Nevertheless, analysis of the IPCC Assessment Reports indicates that integration is skewed towards a particular dimension of human sciences (economics) and major insights from cultural theory and historical analysis have not made it into climate science. A number of relevant disciplines are almost absent in the composition of authorship. Nevertheless, selective assumptions and arguments are made about e.g. historical findings in key documents. In conclusion, we suggest to seek remedies for the lack of historical scholarship in the IPCC reports. More effort at science-policy exchange is needed, and an Integrated Platform to channel humanities and social science expertise for climate change research might be one promising way.
•Humanities and social sciences offer important insights for our understanding of global change.•Policy advice, including the IPCC, draws from a crucially skewed, restricted knowledge pool.•Disciplinary preference is for economic specialists.•IPCC reports show increased awareness of the value of historical insight but stop short of including historical expertise.•IPCC reports have set a research agenda to be followed up by experts but it is not clear that the agenda has been followed up.•We suggest an Integrative Platform to channel human science insights to mitigation advice.
The 3rd World Congress of Environmental History, held in Florianópolis, Brazil had the theme: “Convergences: The Global South and the Global North in the Era of Great Acceleration”. The short paper ...gives an overview of the rewards such congresses can bring. It specifically deals with the plenary talks by Robert Billot and Brigitte Baptiste, highlights the role of scholarly co-operation and makes a case for the opportunity offered by such congresses to review the environment of the hosting country, for which the plenary roundtables, the excursions, and field trips and comparative panels are referred to as examples. World congresses might have an environmental cost, but they do provide unique opportunities for scholarly exchange, in terms of themes, methods, conceptual approaches, and sources used. Behaving in an environmentally conscious way but at the same time enabling and fostering international and intergenerational exchange is a challenge that will have to be taken up in the future.
Research about interdisciplinary research is less and less done by those doing it. This paper tries to reflect upon my own interdisciplinary practices and experiences. In the first part, I present an ...example of successful interdisciplinary research. Then, I attempt to introduce two nested cases of interdisciplinary scholarship and their development, one being my ‘Fakultät’ (which roughly equals a department) and the other, smaller one, being my research group. In the third part, I attempt to offer explanations for the development described with reference to some of the burgeoning literature on interdisciplinarity. Incentive structures, epistemological challenges such as disciplinary capture and structural effects of the hosting university are discussed. In a final section, othering as an inevitable process is used to elucidate the dynamics of developments within and beyond academia and to draw conclusions about the two cases presented.
Societies use material and energy resources to build up, maintain and utilize long-lasting structures such as buildings, infrastructures or machinery, i.e. entertain a ‘social metabolism’. Nexus ...approaches provide useful heuristics for interdisciplinary analyses of (un)sustainable society-nature interactions, for example by highlighting relations between different resources (e.g. land, water and energy). Assuming that social metabolism is mainly motivated by the aim of deriving benefits from products or services leads to the concept of a ‘stock-flow-service nexus’. This nexus approach connects biophysical stocks and flows involved in social metabolism to the services, benefits and well-being contributions they provide to society. It thus reaches beyond narrower concepts of ‘eco-efficiency’. At the same time, it remains mired in controversy over the valuation of services. The complementary approach of a ‘stock-flow-practice nexus’ is focused on the relationships between stocks, flows and practices, i.e. the routines of everyday life linked with resource use. Building on prominent theories of practice, in particular those that have gained traction in consumption research, it avoids controversies around the service concept and offers a fresh perspective on structure-agency issues at the heart of social metabolism. In this conceptual article, we discuss how these two complementary nexus approaches can serve as heuristic models for interdisciplinary sustainability research and sketch the different conceptual and empirical research directions each of these two approaches inspires.
•Nexus heuristics offer useful conceptual bridges between scientific disciplines.•The stock-flow-service nexus concept transgresses narrow notions of eco-efficiency.•The stock-flow-practice nexus links structure and agency in social metabolism.•Choice of nexus heuristics depends on research questions and disciplines involved.
PDF
