People
An overview of the people connected to Centre for Sustainability and Society (SUSY), University of Copenhagen.
SUSY steering committee
| Name | Department | Research | Projects |
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Political Science |
Sustainability in International Relations and International Political Economy, sustainable trade, investments and development; globalisation of the circular economy, Global and European climate diplomacy; sustainable trade issues in the WTO and bilateral trade agreements, primarily EU. |
The EU strategy of sustainable trade promotion; the lines of transitions in the world trading order; "Waste2Trade" - the glocalisation of a circular economy; sustainability in the time of the Covid-19 and geo-economic rivalry. |
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Political Science |
Democracy, citizen involvement, green transition, power, climate change and the Anthropocene epoch. |
Project manager (PI) on two research projects, both funded by Denmark's Independent Research Council (Danmarks Frie Forskningsråd),
Both projects run from 2021-2024. |
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Economics |
Environment- and climate-economic models, environment taxes and climate tariffs, the Green GDP and circular economy. |
Developing an environment- and climate-economic simulation model for Danish economy. Calculating a time series for the development in Denmark's green GDP. Optimal design of CO2 taxes taking into account carbon leakage. |
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Anthropology |
The socio-cultural aspects of natural resource management, fieldwork in Burkina Faso and Tanzania (agro-forestry), Cameroon (agro-pastoral conflicts), Malaysia (management of Niah national park), Thailand, Botswana, Swaziland and South-Africa (sustainable use of natural resources) as well as Denmark (reduction of CO2 emissions). |
From Gray Housing Associations to Green Neighboring Communities. Unlocking the Potential of Green Charcoal Innovations to Mitigate Climate Change in Northern Uganda COMPASS: Collective Movement and Pathways to Sustainable Society: a research project that studies environmental movements to understand how they influence environmental behaviour, social norms, and social institutions. The goal is to contribute with a better theoretical understanding of how environmental norms are created, how they influence behaviour, and how they spread in society as well as to contribute to reducing our ecological footprint by helping grass-root environmental movements to develop and upscale their local, regional and national impact. The project is completed. Read more about the project here in Danish. |
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Psychology |
Current research centres around specific questions of: (a) how social identities are a lens through which people experience the world and act in it; (b) how people navigate membership in groups that are marginalised or devalued, and express themselves and their identity to others against this backdrop, and; (c) how social group memberships, and social relationships, impact on individual health and well-being. |
Professors
| Name | Department | Research | Projects |
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Sociology |
Consumption and everyday life in relation to climate and sustainability with a particular focus on food habits and the problematisation of food habits. |
"Mobility, food and housing in the sustainable transition of everyday life" (DFF, Green Transition, 2021-24) "Sociale drivkræfter og barrierer for klimavenlig kost" (Velux Fonden, 2020-22) |
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Anthropology |
The intersection between climate change and metaphysics. |
Oracular modeling: Translation in Climate Forecasts (OMODE) "Enchanted Ecologies" (2018-2021): Study of the relationship between love of nature and ethic as well as political agency. "Waterworlds" (2009-2014): Study Rarotonga, Cook Islands, about the local population's response to sea level rise. |
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Political Science |
Governing as it pertains to oceans and the maritime environment. How the oceans are secured, protected and governed at different levels, and how techniques, such as monitoring, law enforcement or planning are used to do so. Conceptually drawing on practice theory, relationalism and actor-network theory. |
The link between environment protection, law enforcement and environmental crime at sea, with an interest in West Africa, the Western Indian Ocean and the South Pacific; the challenges faced by small island states, and the impact of climate change on maritime security. |
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Political Science |
Sustainability and climate change governance, in combination with local democracy, citizen- and user action. |
The development and implementation of a green GDP with colleagues at the Dept. of Economics, UCPH and interviewing experts in international organisations such as the OECD, the World Bank, the UN, EU, etc. Two projects focusing on citizen-driven environmental and climate action in various forms: 1) COMPASS project (Collective Movements and Pathways to a Sustainable Society) and 2) CIDEA (Citizen-Driven Environmental Action). |
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Sociology |
Founder and Chair of CoMMonS, UCPH's Copenhagen Centre for Political Mobilisation and Social Movement Studies. |
The Copenhagen Centre for Political Mobilisation and Social Movement Studies produces systematic research on mobilisation, protest, acts of citizenship, and political engagement on climate justice in Denmark and internationally. |
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Political Science |
International climate politics, the climate's impact on international politics, climate protest movements as well as in particular the political and societal aspects of large-scale CO2 capture and storage and climate geoengineering. |
iSPACE (DFF Project 1) International Security Politics and Climate Engineering - a three-year project with a focus on geoengineering in international negotiations, perceptions with security experts and climate scientists' understanding of technologies' place in the world's politics. |
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Anthropology |
The Danish and European climate justice movement, knowledge of social movements' action forms and impact on the political climate agenda; international climate politics on forest (wood and CO2) as well as deforestation, extraction industry and industrial agriculture in the Amazon; climate and agriculture in Denmark, knowledge of social processes in relation to establishment of untouched forest, national nature parks and removal of low-lying soils. |
Fire and Political Alterity in Amazonia |
Associate Professors
| Name | Department | Research | Projects |
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Economics |
Resource and environmental economics, welfare economics and game theory; whether we can infer socially relevant intertemporal preferences from saving behavior in the market. |
"Cross-dynastic intergenerational altruism" (solo-authored) "Early warning signals" (with F.K. Diekert, D. Heyen and S. Shayegh) "Pricing carbon" (with M.A. Drupp and R.C. Schmidt) |
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Anthropology |
Adaptation to flooding, risk perceptions in relation to flooding, storm floods and storms, catastrophe and risk cultures as well as climate politics and crisis preparedness on EU-level and national level in Denmark. Ethnographic fieldwork in Fiji, Germany and Denmark. Digital methods and mixed-methods at SODAS. |
Coastal Conflicts - Mapping Storm Surge Protection Disagreements and Solutions in Denmark Changing Disasters (KU excellence programme) as PhD and ESPRESSO (Horizon 2020) as postdoc. The latter project dealt with the overlap between catastrophe risks and climate challenges on the political level in EU and Denmark. Advising RealDania and Danish municipalities in the campaign Byerne og det Stigende Havvand, where the municipalities attempt to implement new measures for coastal protection and storm flood management. |
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Anthropology |
Anthropological methods and fieldwork, organisational studies, human-technology interactions and co-design with civil society. |
The Danish Model for Citizen Engagement in the Renewable energy Transition (DART) Designing Community Collaboration for Sustainable Energy Parks (DEEP) COMPASS: Green communities in Denmark Smart Cities Accelerator: Sustainable cities and smart energy systems |
Postdoctoral Researchers
| Name | Department | Research | Projects |
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Political Science
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Social and political theory, radical democracy theory, new branches within political theory occupied with the climate area in a broad sense together with New Materialism and ANT (Actor-Network Theory), which argue for a rethinking of the relationship between the human and the non-human - not least in light of the ongoing ecological and climate crisis.
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How the climate crisis constitutes a case for rethinking central democratic concepts such as "participation", "representation" and "leadership", combining insights from political theory with ethnographic field studies to try to understand and learn from how climate change is thought about and acted on in a small community as well as how it can help to challenge and nuance existing political thinking in the climate field. "Democratic Innovations in a Green Transition" (2021-2024), which deals with the Danish climate citizenship. |
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Economics
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Working within the fields of environmental economics and macroeconomics, i.e. computational economics, transportation, energy markets, integrated assessment models, and macroeconomics more broadly.
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The development of a computable general equilibrium model that allows for the evaluation of economic and environmental policies within a unified conceptual framework. Research focuses exclusively on energy markets and transportation.
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Economics |
The economic consequences of climate change, i.e. weather catastrophes such as drought, cyclones etc. and involving future expected climate change in relation to poverty and economic development. Primarily dealing with Africa and in particular Mozambique and Ethiopia. |
In Ethiopia part of the FFU project "Building Resilience to Climate Change". In Mozambique part of the project inter alia investigating the effects of a larger cyclone which hit the country last year. |
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SODAS
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Climate impacts research, climate social data science, social & behavioural adaptation, climate & health equity and climate econometrics.
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Currently conducting research on the social impacts of climate change on human behaviour and well-being, using local, national and global big data. "Planetary Monitoring of Climate Impacts & Human Health" "Behavioural Adaptation to Climate Change" |
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| Political Science |
Opinion formation in the climate area with a focus on extreme weather events and the media coverage of the climate crisis, applying quantitative methods and data, including survey data, and have causal inference about climate opinion formation as goal.
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Investigating how different opinions to the climate crisis are affected by extreme weather, by the scope and character of the media's climate coverage and by interactions between the two. The hypothesis is that the media can politicise the weather by connecting it to climate change and thereby activate our personal experiences with the weather as a politically relevant source of information. |