RIFS Blog

September 2004. We were a few days into the Langtang–Helambu trail when we heard one evening that several people had died in a landslide in Dhunche, the national park’s entry point. Twelve days later, back on the road to Kathmandu, our bus was stopped and checked by the army more than once. Nepali passengers had to step out while the few foreigners on board had to show their passports. Back at the hotel in Kathmandu, we learned that a car bomb had exploded in the city the day before we arrived. Nepal was still at war. Kathmandu itself had little reliable electricity then; families and businesses organised their lives around random power outages. I did not expect that, 19 years later, after spending most of my professional life in Latin America, I would return to the Himalaya, not for another long trek, but to learn from its rivers, its Indigenous communities, and the complexities of hydropower and energy transitions.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are among the few issues on which the international community is fundamentally in agreement, at least on paper – or so it seemed in the past. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was adopted by the United Nations in 2015. However, the High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) on the implementation of the SDGs, which took place in July at the United Nations in New York, revealed an ever-widening gap between resolutions and implementation. In addition, the negotiation processes for the post-2030 period have not yet been officially launched.

You may recall the discussions from a few decades ago, when many questioned whether it was premature to discuss climate adaptation. At that time, the impacts of climate change were just beginning to manifest globally. A lively debate ensued: should urgently needed adaptation measures be implemented immediately, or would such discussions and developments be co-opted by influential industry players to stall a transition away from fossil fuels? Today, the need to discuss climate adaptation is widely recognized and accepted.

On 13 –31 July 2026, hundreds of delegates from around 85 countries gathered at the headquarters of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Jamaica for the ISA Council and Assembly meetings, joined by observers from numerous organizations and institutions. The meetings included continuing negotiations on the Mining Code, a binding set of regulations intended to govern the equitable use of mineral resources and protection of the marine environment in what is known as the Area. Comprising the seabed, ocean floor and subsoil beyond the limits of national jurisdiction, the Area is designated under international law as the common heritage of humankind.

The European Commission’s proposed Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) marks a dramatic effort to revive European industrial policy. Aiming to boost manufacturing to 20% of EU GDP by 2035 (from 14% in 2024) through "Made in EU" procurement rules, FDI conditions, and streamlined permitting for clean technologies, the IAA reflects a growing recognition that market forces alone cannot deliver the green transition.

For over twenty years, my research has followed rivers, mountains and sacred sites across Guatemala, Ecuador, Colombia and Nepal, asking what changes when we treat these places not as a backdrop to human affairs, but as living participants. Together with Indigenous and non-Indigenous filmmakers, I recently co-created two documentaries under the European Research Council project RIVERS – Human Rights Beyond the Human?, asking how legal and ethical questions shift once land becomes an agent, not a natural resource. As the 2026 Klaus Töpfer Sustainability Fellow at RIFS, I am now turning that experience into practical ethical guidance for how researchers and artists can collaborate more responsibly. It starts with a very concrete question: How do you ask living land itself for permission?

In June 2026, the Saami Council, in cooperation with the RIFS research group “reIMAGINE Arctic Research”, organized and facilitated a sharing event/exhibition in the municipality of Unjárga/Nesseby in Sápmi (Norway). The event was part of the EU-Horizon BIRGEJUPMI project and the culmination of Work Package 4 “Local and global futures: young people’s visions of sustainable livelihoods and inclusive environmental decision-making”, which set out to investigate young people’s visions of their future in the face of climate change and its consequences in coastal municipalities in Sápmi.

This question was central to a workshop presented by the RIFS digitalisation team at the 13th International Conference on Information and Communications Technology for Sustainability (ICT4S 2026) in Bern. Together with participants, we explored whether these systems subtly shape how we think about environmental and social responsibility. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok function not only as technical tools but also as silent interpreters, potentially shaping our understanding of environmental and social responsibility, conflicts, and future challenges.

Loss and Damage (L&D) from climate change is a complex, multi-perspective issue spanning norms, values, material and financial assets, individual lives, cultures, political and business interests as well as governance processes with a multitude of actors and sectors involved. Amid this complexity, effective solutions to L&D challenges can only be developed through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches.

The EU’s green and digital transitions depend heavily on critical raw materials, most of which are currently imported. To reduce supply-chain vulnerabilities and strengthen strategic autonomy, the EU adopted the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) in 2024, which promotes domestic extraction, processing, and recycling and aims to meet at least 10% of demand for strategic raw materials from European sources by 2030. This shift has renewed debate over the role of domestic mining in a just green transition, raising questions about several commonly held assumptions.

Transformation research extends beyond examining technological and economic changes to include questions of justice essential for forging a sustainable future. Our institute’s research on structural change in the Lusatia and Rhine regions has shown that gender differences are too often overlooked, a topic that we explored in depth in a recent contribution to the journal "Forum Wissenschaft".

Germany is not an Arctic state. Nonetheless, German policymakers, scientists and NGOs all engage with the region. The Arctic is not only of geopolitical interest, but home to Indigenous peoples and their cultures. They live within highly sensitive ecosystems threatened by changes such as sea ice decline and a warming climate.
The Arctic Dialogue is a series of semi-annual meetings organized by the German Arctic Office at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute (AWI) and aimed at cultivating an open dialogue on Arctic matters between science and policymakers, including representatives of German Federal Ministries, research institutes, and NGOs engaged in Arctic research. This year, RIFS was invited to host the Arctic Dialogue and set the theme in cooperation with the Arctic Office. The Saami Council partnered with RIFS and was decisive in organizing the thematic sessions.