22 million SEK for research projects on strategies for sustainable climate and biodiversity
The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency recently granted a total of SEK 21 996 806 to the project 'Navigating the Political Landscape: Barriers and Synergies in Climate and Biodiversity Strategies'. David Langlet, environmental law professor at the Faculty of Law, is one of the researchers in the project.
Description of the project
Society is increasingly affected by two partly interconnected environmental crises: climate change and the widespread loss of species and biodiversity. There is no shortage of public policies aimed at promoting sustainable development in general and climate and biodiversity objectives in particular. On the contrary, there are plenty of strategies for sustainable societal transformation that span the local, national, and global levels. Nevertheless, important environmental objectives are still not being met. Current climate and biodiversity strategies face a number of barriers to effective implementation and target achievement. These include a poor match between overall policy objectives and the concrete instruments used to achieve them; various types of implementation failures when objectives are shunted between authorities, administrative levels, and individual officials; conflicting objectives between different environmental policies, sometimes even contradicting each other; conflicts with policies in other policy areas, or with the agendas and actions of different societal actors (e.g. businesses, organisations, households, and individuals). Together, these barriers are major causes of missed targets and poor performance.
The aim of the programme is to increase our knowledge of these barriers and provide recommendations on how contemporary and future climate and biodiversity strategies can be improved to avoid controversies and conflicts of objectives and instead increase synergies between different strategies. To achieve this, the programme draws on expertise from a range of social science disciplines, uses a diverse set of methods, and consistently interacts closely with relevant stakeholders at local, regional, national and global levels.
The programme will provide those working to translate national and international strategies into policy practice and concrete action with guidance on how climate and biodiversity objectives can be reconciled in policy decisions and effectively achieved, and what institutional, policy, and organisational changes are needed to overcome the current barriers to making these changes.
Call: Programme within Sustainable Climate Transition and Climate Adaptation 2022
Grantor: Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (Environmental Research Grant)
Project title: Navigating the Political Landscape: barriers and Synergies in climate and Biodiversity Strategies
Principal applicant: Simon Matti, Professor at the Division of Social Sciences, Luleå University of Technology.
Other participating researchers:
David Langlet, Professor at the Department of Law, Uppsala University
Christine Holmström Lind, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University
Sverker Jagers, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg
Mikael Karlsson, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University
Daniel Lindvall, researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University
Judith Lundberg-Felten, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Forest Mycology and Plant Pathology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Naghmeh Nasiritousi, researcher at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs
Maria Cicilaki