Only connect - from local actions to a substantial improvement in sustainability?

This presentation relates a strive for substantial change towards sustainability to a methodology on how nets of human actions are shaping and are shaped by material (physical) flows. The methodology addresses the usefulness of considering new approaches based on the reported severity of global environmental issues; for example, human activities have been found to make tens to hundreds more species extinct per year compared to pre-human times. The methodology also responds to the limited degree of focus in engineering research on social aspects and among social scientists on the magnitude of environmental impacts. The methodology combines qualitative organisation studies with quantitative environmental studies of material flows such as the primary flows along the production, consumption, and waste management of a product (life-cycle assessment). Interestingly, experience from developing the methodology raises some fundamental questions related to sustainability. This far, the methodology is based on values that are delimited to, for example, only one product or a few products at a time, and that are short-term, not covering ethical and spiritual aspects, and human-centred (Molander, per comm, 2019). Already the current scope of the methodology is complex to apply, and an extension could raise questions about limits to knowledge and ask me as a researcher whether I am acting as a role model within the net of humans that shapes and is shaped by material flows.

About Mathias Lindkvist

Mathias Lindkvist is currently a Researcher at Environmental Systems Analysis, Chalmers University of Technology. He completed his PhD at Chalmers University of Technology in 2019. Lindkvist’s research interests lie in relations between global environmental sustainability, knowledge and researchers, and combines the fields of science and technology studies and environmental engineering. He was a visiting doctoral student at the Industrial Ecology Programme, Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 2014. Lindkvist is a reviewer for the publications Journal of Cleaner Production and Sustainability. He holds an MSc in Engineering physics and a BSc in Human ecology.

Open for anyone interested! Please share in your networks to people interested in next week’s topic. 

A light lunch will be served, so please let us know if you are coming by Monday January 27, 12pm: Judith.dalsgard@uib.no