European Science for Sustainability – Achievements

and Challenges

February 27 – March 2, 2002

Walberberg, Germany

The Walberberg Meeting

• Organised by IHDP (Sylvia Karlsson)

• Organising Committee (Jäger, Jaeger, Cramer, Karlsson, Munda, Svedin)

• Funded by German Federal Ministry for Education and Research

• Participants: ~20

The European Context

• Strong „policy push“ within the EU

• 6th Framework Programme (EU Parliament recently approved budget of 16,720 million Euros)

• „Networks of Excellence“ (larger, long-term projects)

European Experience

• Pattern of non-cumulative research

• Participatory Approaches

The Walberberg Themes

• Developing an empirical basis for Sustainability Science

• Designing a European research project on Sustainability Science

Developing the Empirical Basis

• Detecting „seeds of change“• Well-documented observations of

transitions (starting points, drivers of change, patterns of change)

• Rapid Start – meta-analysis of patterns of sustainability using historical examples and published case studies (focus on energy sysems, water and land use)

Long-term Strategy

• Health, water, biodiversity and land use

• Remote sensing, ground-based and socio-economic data

• Combining qualitative and quantitative information

• „learning by doing“

Designing a European Research Project

• Ambitious initiative to explore complex relations between food consumption/production systems and transitions to sustainability

• Case studies (examples listed in the report)

• Investigating cross-scale linkages

Challenges include.....

• Developing a process

• Long-term stable funding

• Peer review process

• Participation of young researchers

Moving Forward

• Linking knowledge and action (including education specialists, media, broader stakeholder community)

• The EU 6th Framework Programme (letter of interest)