Publications

Understanding the physical and biogeochemical interactions and feedbacks between the ocean and atmosphere is a vital component of environmental and Earth system research.

In the moment of preparation of this paper, the world is still globally in grip of the Corona (COVID-19) crisis, and the need to understand the broader overall framework of the crisis increases.

A sustainability transition in line with achieving global climate goals requires the implementation of win-win strategies (WWS), i.e.

Based on an extensive synthesis of semi-structured interviews, media content analysis, and reviews, this article conducts a qualitative meta-analysis of more than 560 sources of evidence to identify 38 visions associated with seven different low-c

Although radiation protection is challenged by many uncertainties, there is no systematic study investigating the definitions and types of these uncertainties.

Not only is the climate changing, but so is global climate governance. Climate policy initiatives have proliferated within and beyond the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) regime in a polycentric pattern.

There is increasing interest in developing anticipatory governance of climate engineering (CE) research.

Decarbonising heating supply is an important part of the global energy transition, and a vital step towards mitigating climate change. We analyse the transformative potential of German and UK heating sector decarbonisation policies.

Manganese nodules contain economically valuable metals which may be mined in the future to supply metals to a growing world population.

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is a global hot spot for aerosol emissions, which affect the regional climate and air quality.

Indicators are an essential component of national strategies and policies relating to energy transition and regulation.

We present a Strengths, Vulnerability, and Intervention Assessment related to Digital Threats (SVIDT) method, which provides a problem structuring and decision support for organizational vulnerability and resilience management with respect to chan

This study argues from a sociology of knowledge perspective which considers implicit knowledge as the basis for orientation towards a certain topic. Reconstructing this type of knowledge can help to better understand the learner’s perspective.

The Kathmandu Valley in Nepal is a bowl-shaped urban basin that experiences severe air pollution that poses health risks to its 3.5 million inhabitants.

High investment costs are a key impediment to the energetic refurbishment of residential buildings in Germany.

Der Einfluss der Digitalisierung auf Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft ist omnipräsent und kann nicht losgelöst von der Debatte zur nachhaltigen Entwicklung betrachtet werden.

A multi-scale modelling system was developed to provide hourly NOx concentration fields at a building-resolving scale in the urban area of Modena, a city in the middle of the Po Valley (Italy), one of the most polluted areas in Europe.

How are novel energy, technology, and land-use systems strategies for limiting climate change judged to be ‘feasible’?

Rural energy consumption not only significantly affects the national economy but also informs us about the living conditions of rural residents.

Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCU) is an emerging technology field that can replace fossil carbon value chains, and that has a significant potential to achieve emissions mitigation or even “negative emissions”—however in many cases with challeng

“Access and allocation” is one of the five analytical problems identified as key for analysing earth system governance in the first Earth System Governance Science and Implementation Plan officially published in 2009.

Der vorliegende Text verortet Nachhaltigkeit und Klimaschutz knapp in ihrem historischen Kontext und macht ihre aufeinander bezogene Entwicklung deutlich.

In demokratischen Gesellschaften sind weitreichende Politikmaßnahmen wie zur Energiewende oder zum Klimaschutz auf eine breite Legitimation im politischen Raum angewiesen.

Es sind die Beziehungen zu uns selbst, Anderen und unserem Kontext, die bestimmen, ob sich das Gesamtsystem in einen gesunden oder ungesunden Zustand entwickelt.

While the idea of extracting deep-seabed resources dates back to as early as the 1960s, it remained pure fiction for decades due to limited technical possibilities and prohibitive costs.

Eco-efficiency enhancement is an inherent requirement of green development and an important indicator of high-quality development in general. It aims to achieve the coordinated development of nature, the economy, and society.

This study, based on new and high quality in situ observations, quantifies for the first time, the individual contributions of light-absorbing aerosols (black carbon (BC), brown carbon (BrC) and dust) to aerosol absorption over the Indo-Gangetic P

The Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) suffers from recurrent heavy air pollution during the dry season of each year.

Learning rates are a central concept in energy system models and integrated assessment models, as they allow researchers to project the future costs of new technologies and to optimize energy system costs.

This paper presents the main messages of a South American expert roundtable (ERT) on the unintended side effects (unseens) of digital transformation.

This forum contribution explains how analyzing the creation, distribution, and destruction of contemporary credit money is placed centre stage in the emerging field of critical macro-finance.

The seasonal aerosol radiative forcing efficiency (ARFE) in the atmosphere was found high (>100 Wm-2) and consistent throughout the year over Dusanbe, the capital city of Tajikistan in central Asia.

This study reports comprehensive analysis of seasonal and inter-annual variations of aerosol properties (optical, physical and chemical) and radiative effects over Pokhara Valley in the foothills of central Himalayas in Nepal utilizing the high-qu

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is an important process for evaluating the effects of development, and to assist decisions to effectively manage potential deep-sea mining (DSM).

Environmental concerns were raised from the very onset of discussions concerning the extraction of metalliferous ores from the deep sea, but most studies have targeted the expected impacts on the benthic communities only.

In this article, we critically discuss the role of collaboration in Germany’s path towards a post-carbon economy.

Industry 4.0 has had a strong influence on the debate on the digitalization of industrial processes, despite being criticized for lacking a proper definition.

Strew pellet production not only contribute to regional sustainable development and localized energy transition, but also help to mitigate global greenhouse gas emissions.

This article argues that the process of developing the regulations of commercial deep seabed mining operations presents a window of opportunity to actively and systematically address existing uncertainties regarding the environmental effects of se

In der Klimadebatte kommen integrative Konzepte der Nachhaltigkeitsforschung kaum zum Zuge. Dies zeigt der Lausitzer Kohleausstieg beispielhaft: Soziales und Umwelt werden gegeneinander ausgespielt.

This study presents a comprehensive analysis of organic carbon (OC), elemental carbon (EC), and particularly the light absorption characteristics of EC and water-soluble brown carbon (WS–BrC) in total suspended particles in the Kathmandu Valley fr

As the forerunner and policy test field of the sustainable development, the sustainable development pilot zones are an important strategy for China to explore the mechanism and model of the coordinated development of human and land in different re

Die Lausitz steht vor einer doppelten Herausforderung in den nächsten Jahrzehnten. Mit dem Kohleausstieg wird eine zentrale Industrie wegbrechen und bereits heute erfährt die sich zunehmend radikalisierende AfD in der Region große Zustimmung.

Resource nexus research gained ground in the last decade prompted by crises of food and water supply throughout the world.

Grid integration remains one of the key challenges related to the worldwide expansion of distributed renewable energy systems.

The health of the ocean, central to human well-being, has now reached a critical point.

The tropical tropopause layer (TTL) is the transition region between the well-mixed convective troposphere and the radiatively controlled stratosphere with air masses showing chemical and dynamical properties of both regions.

The very beginning of collaborative research endeavors often lies in politically difficult and practically challenging entanglements. The purpose of this paper is to empirically capture and theoretically conceptualize these entanglements.

In this article we argue that the notion of control poses a critical conceptual and historical connection between scientific and political power.

Expertise in research integration and implementation is an essential but often overlooked component of tackling complex societal and environmental problems.

This paper investigates contestation of authority in EU energy policy, with a focus on natural gas. It argues that the main challenge centers on the EU’s goals and means of energy security policy, not the location and scope of authority.

Total suspended particles (TSP) were collected in Lumbini from April 2013 to March 2016 to better understand the characteristics of carbonaceous aerosol (CA) concentrations, compositions and sources and their light absorption properties in rural r

A convening of leading international sustainability experts met for the first time in Potsdam, Germany, in March 2019 to re-think sustainability primarily as a societal challenge.

Many teams have developed a wide range of numerical or categorical indicators of progress in the implementation of the SDG targets.

The notion of systemic risks denominates the danger of destruction of a whole system by the mechanisms of nonlinear interactions between its agents in combination with circular causality between the system´s elementary dynamic processes and the ma

In this Open Access book, Sander van der Leeuw examines how the modern world has been caught in a socioeconomic dynamic that has generated the conundrum of sustainability.

This opinion article offers insights into the geopolitics of the ongoing global energy transition. In doing so, it draws heavily on a workshop in Berlin in late 2018, and a subsequent paper in the journal Nature. Four scenarios are presented.

Best Paths, the largest research project in the field of energy financed under the European Union's 7th Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration, explored new avenues for delivering reliable power in Europe thr

The involvement of early career researchers (ECRs) has been limited during the past Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment cycles. We conducted a global survey among ECRs and interviewed key experts of the IPCC process.

The use of carbon dioxide as a feedstock for a broad range of products can help mitigate the effects of climate change through long‐term removal of carbon or as part of a circular carbon economy.

The challenge facing humanity is to live sustainably within both the ecological and physical limits of our planet and the societal boundaries needed for social cohesion and well-being.

The Anthropocene as a new planetary epoch has brought to the foreground the deep-time interconnections of human agency with the earth system.

Gene editing tools are ‘revolutionizing’ microbiological research. Much of the public debate focuses on the possibility of human germ line applications.

The ocean crisis is urgent and central to human wellbeing and life on Earth; past and current activities are damaging the planet's main life support system for future generations.

Climate change has been labelled the human rights challenge of the twenty-first century. Loss and damage resulting from climate change, in particular, poses a severe threat to the human rights of affected communities.

Grand societal challenges call for a sustainability transition away from a fossil-based society toward a bioeconomy, in which energy and manufacturing production processes are based on sustainable biological resources.

What is democratic theory? The question is surprisingly infrequently posed.

Sufficiency is one important strategy for sustainable development. At an individual level, we need a better understanding of the relationship between sufficiency attitude and CO2 footprint.

Digitalisierung und Globalisierung sind eng mit den Bemühungen um nachhaltige Entwicklung verknüpft, aber sie werden diese nur fördern, wenn sie bewusst nach Prinzipien der Nachhaltigkeit gestaltet werden.

Eine CO2-neutrale Umgestaltung unseres Energiesystems bedingt einen gesamt gesellschaftlichen Veränderungsprozess.

Die Digitalisierung wird zunehmend nicht mehr nur als Chance, sondern auch als Risiko für eine nachhaltige Entwicklung und die Überwindung globaler Ungleichheiten wahrgenommen.

The paper applies the concept of systemic risks to natural disasters, more precisely to the combination of natural and human-induced disasters.

The article interprets the German “Energiewende” as a contested process. The complex articulation of economic developments, civil society disputes and state policies are analyzed from a political-economy perspective.

International cooperation in support of a global energy transition is on the rise, and official development assistance (ODA) in the energy sector is increasingly being directed to renewable energy sources.

Energy poverty has become one of the major challenges faced by the world's energy system. However, there is no consensus on the measure of energy poverty.

In the framework of the EURODELTA-Trends (EDT) modeling experiment, several chemical transport models (CTMs) were applied for the 1990–2010 period to investigate air quality changes in Europe as well as the capability of the models to reproduce ob

This article analyses the narratives of impact-driven transition research in the field of sustainability studies. It reconstructs patterns of narrations at a discourse level.

The lack of a comprehensive, up-to-date emission inventory for the Himalayan region is a major challenge in understanding the extensive regional air pollution, including its causes, impacts and mitigation pathways.

The Southern Ocean and coastal Antarctica provide a variety of ecosystem services with benefits for humankind that are of regional and global importance.

Profound societal transformations are needed to move society from unsustainability to greater sustainability under continually changing social and environmental conditions.

Five U.S. B-52 Bombers were conducting a training mission on March 28 high over the Norwegian Sea in the Arctic Ocean. F-16 fighter jets from Norway were also aloft, part of joint NATO exercises involving 10,000 troops in northern Sweden.

Cross-city convergence in green space coverage could contribute to our understanding of the law of motion of distribution dynamics of environmental sustainability across cities and provide crucial information for designing policies regarding compl

In relation to organizational performance measurement, there is a growing concern about the creation of value for people, society and the environment.

Urban mobility is the main source of air pollution in Europe and accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Air pollution remains a problem in German cities. In particular, the nitrogen dioxide (NO2) annual limit-value set by the European Union of 40 µg/m3 was not met at ~40% of roadside monitoring stations across German cities in 2018.

In der Rubrik BildungsPraxis hat Susanne Offen, Mitglied der Journal-Redaktion, ein Interview mit David Löw Beer vom Institut für transformative Nachhaltigkeitsforschung geführt, in dem insbesondere auf demokratische Prozesse, gesellschaftliche Ma

Identification of atmospheric aerosol types and characterization of absorbing aerosols, based on AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) data collected during 2013-2014 over two sites in Nepal: Lumbini in the northernmost part of central Indo-Gangetic P