Category Archives: Highlights
Resource Efficiency in developing and emerging economies
SERI´s research group “Sustainable Resource Use” investigates the use of natural resources on which our societies are built. Some of the central concerns in this field include differences in extraction, consumption, trade and efficiency across different countries and world regions.
The basis of much of our work in this field is the website www.materialflows.net, an online portal for material flow data providing easy access to global data on resource extraction for more than 200 countries and the time period of 1980 to 2008, aggregated into 12 categories of material flows. The website is based on the first comprehensive and worldwide database on global resource extraction, set up and administrated by SERI in cooperation with the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, Energy.
Ecosystems at our service – how can we benefit in a sustainable way?
SERI´s research group “Quality of Life and Integrated Strategies” investigates how we can achieve a good life for ourselves and future generations. This implies that we have to take care of the ecosystems we depend on and use their resources in a sustainable way.
This highlight aims to show how we - as human beings with individual knowledge, skills, networks and relationships– make decisions on how to benefit from ecosystems.
Communicating the Idea
[...]Sustainable development is increasingly dependent on ideas rather than information. This means that empirical data is often not enough on our way to a sustainable society. Year after year, scientific research creates thousands of pages of environmental data supporting the assumption that our current western lifestyles have reached a level of resource and energy consumption
Colouring growth in a sustainable world
[...]Economic growth has come under fierce criticism in recent years because it has led to substantial environmental problems: renewable resources are not renewed, non-renewable resources are being depleted, and global ecosystem processes are disrupted. Through its effects on nature, society and the moral values underpinning it, as well as on the realm of politics, this
Europe’s Strategy for a Resource-Efficient future
[...]Succeeding the “Lisbon Strategy” which has been the EU’s main economic agenda for the past ten years, the new “Europe 2020” strategy was launched last year and is now being implemented on the national and European scale. While the “Lisbon Strategy” used to be exclusively growth oriented, the new strategy of economic development also takes