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The implementation of sustainable consumption presents one of the greatest challenges of our era. Consumption is a wanted and necessary phenomenon, integral to our society and economy, yet our way of consuming contradicts important ecological and social long-term goals. Although research on sustainable consumption has gained in importance and been addressed by various disciplines, the new Handbook of Research on Sustainable Consumption is one of the few to compile and summarize the important research findings. more

 

The journal Evidence & Policy invites contributions to a special issue on "Advancing evidence-based sustainable development policies: new approaches addressing the science-policy interface. Guest editors are André Martinuzzi, Institute for Managing Sustainability at WU Wien and IÖW scientist Gerd Scholl. Deadline for Submission of abstracts is April 1st, 2015. more

 

Do you remember what was happening back in 1985? Scientists report a hole in the ozone layer. The Brundtland Commission is working on the report ‘Our Common Future’. The French secret service sinks the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior I. ‘Sustainable’ is still a technical term used in forestry. Little consideration is given to CO2 emissions and climate change. That year, on 30 May, a dedicated group of progressive thinkers in the field of environmental research planted a seed in the Berlin soil that would grow and grow: they founded the Institute for Ecological Economy Research. more

 

Fighting climate change should be one of our priorities today. Additionally, it is utterly important to adapt to the consequences of global warming. But adaptation often fails because of barriers, which are hard to overcome. Based on the international Chameleon Research Workshop, held in autumn 2012 in Berlin, a team of researchers from IÖW, the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg and renowned international climate adaptation scientists conducted a review of current research on barriers to adaptation and developed recommendations on how to advance barrier research. Results are published in the article “Explaining and overcoming barriers to climate change adaption” in the journal Nature Climate Change. more

 

On the occasion of the 4th international Degrowth Conference in Leipzig the Blog Postwachstum widened its focus towards the international Degrowth debate and extended its offering by English articles from all over the world. From now on, the editors of Blog Postwachstum at the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW) will also cooperate with the team of The Daly News at the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE). more

 

A book promoting policies to make it easier to live the Good Life must do two things. Firstly, it must demonstrate that such policies are necessary; secondly, it must set out how such a policy programme is to be implemented. In other words, it has to show that the politics of sufficiency is feasible. more

 

Online games for the conservation of the environment or crowd-funding for the protection of yellow-tailed woolly monkeys – this is how Alexander Iscenco from Moldova and Bruno Monteferri from Peru combine science and practical approaches for sustainable development. The young scientists are currently guests at the IÖW for the next three months. Here, the laureates of the “Green Talents – International Forum for High Potentials in Sustainable Development” competition of the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) will get to know the institutes interdisciplinary sustainability research and will enrich it with their ideas and experiences. more

 

In her thesis, IÖW researcher Elisa Dunkelberg presents a new, case-study-based approach to quantifying indirect land-use change (ILUC) caused by biofuels production. Her book, A Case-Study Approach to Quantifying Indirect Land-Use Change due to Expanding Biofuels Feedstock Cultivation came about as part of the research project ‘Fair Fuels?’ This junior research group was supported under the Federal Ministry of Education and Research’s social-ecological research funding priority. more

 

How can social entrepreneurship contribute to the sustainable use of water? The book Social Entrepreneurship in the Water Sector aims to answer this question. It presents six case studies of initiatives in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America that aimed to find out how the motto ‘Getting Things Done Sustainably’ could be implemented in practice – in areas as diverse as drinking water, sanitation facilities, agriculture, industrial water use and water in ecosystems. The book summarises the findings of the social-ecological research project GETIDOS, run by the University of Greifswald and the IÖW. more

 

A new, interactive internet portal that shows the current situation regarding water in Germany was launched this week at http://www.bmbf.wasserfluesse.de. The Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW) unveiled the website at the IFAT, the world’s leading trade fair for environmental technologies in Munich, which runs from 5th to 9th May 2014. The website can be used to look up information on topics including how precipitation and evaporation are distributed across the different regions in Germany, how power stations, industry and households use water, and what the possible future scenarios are for water availability in times of climate change. more