Arrhenius, Gustaf , Duus-Otterström, Göran , Engström, Emma , Fairbrother, Malcolm , Jebari, Karim , Jylhä, Kirsti , Kolk, Martin , Roussos, Joe , Spears, Dean | 2024
Slutrapport från projektet Hållbar folkmängd - möjlig levnadsstandard, finansierad av Global Challenges Foundation.
Cut from the foreword by PI Gustaf Arrhenius:
I’m pleased to present the report from the research project “Sustainable population in the time of climate challenge” which has been made possible through a generous grant from the Global Challenges Foundation (GCF). This has been quite a unique project. The research questions in the call by GCF were of a very wide scope and could not be addressed through any obvious or well-accepted method in a single discipline. We therefore had to take a genuinely interdisciplinary approach and develop novel approaches that allowed us to investigate the questions from several angles.
Our research team is composed of researchers in climate science, demography, economics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and technology studies. All of our subprojects involved researchers from two or more of those disciplines, working with methods that cross the boundaries of academic disciplines. An illustrative example, to just take one, is our study of emerging food technologies, presented in section 6. It is about agriculture, it is authored by a philosopher and a scholar of technology, and it uses a backcasting method from futures studies. The result is an innovative and insightful study of this crucial aspect of sustainable population levels.
Executive Summary
1. Global Population Growth
2. Demography and Climate Change
3. Fair Population Reduction
4. Public Attitudes
5. IPAT Analysis
6. Paths to Sustainable Food in 2100: How far can technology take us?
