Conceptualizing a Sustainable Food System in an Automated World: Toward a “Eudaimonian” Future

The industrialized world has entered a new era of widespread automation, and although this may create long-term gains in economic productivity and wealth accumulation, many professions are expected to disappear during the ensuing shift, leading to potentially significant disruptions in labor markets and associated socioeconomic difficulties. Food production, like many other industrial sectors, has also undergone a century of mechanization, having moved toward increasingly large-scale…

Mapping the automation of Twitter communications on climate change, sustainability, and environmental crises — a review of current research.

Online social media such as the microblog Twitter are key digital arenas shaping the public discourse on important societal topics. Automated social media accounts, so-called ‘social bots,’ have emerged as a controversial phenomenon, proven to both disrupt and support online communications on topics such as political elections and public health. To what extent social bots also impact online conversations on climate change, environmental crises, and…

Principles to avoid policy paralysis

Global environmental change challenges are to their nature complex, and complexity seems to be somewhat of a buzzword in contemporary sustainability science. But too much focus on complex interactions can create a hurdle for appropriate policy decisions and even cause an uncertainty paralysis, signified by a failure to act even in the face of looming threats. Fret not, however, in a new article in the…

Automated framing of climate change? The role of social bots in the Twitter climate change discourse during the 2019/2020 Australia bushfires

Extreme weather-related events like wildfires have been increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change. Public online conversations that reflect on these events as climate emergencies can create awareness and build support for climate action but are also used to spread misinformation and climate change denial. To what extent automated social media accounts—“social bots”—amplify different perspectives of such events and influence climate change discourses,…

Sustainability, autonomy, and benefits from forest commons

The water and diamond paradox and green NNP as a welfare indicator

A classical structure that is used to analyze the water and diamond paradox provides an intuitive underpinning to the modern theory of welfare measurement in a growth context. John Law’s and Adam Smith’s concepts of value-in-use and value-in-exchange have modern aggregated counterparts. Complemented with Dupuit’s extension in terms of a utility function with a declining marginal utility, they are close to enough to provide the…

The Causes of Land-use and Land-Cover Change: Moving Beyond the Myths

Land Cover and Population Density in the Baltic Sea Drainage Basin: A GIS Database

Implementing Environmental Policies in Central and Eastern Europe

The Emergence of an Ecological Economics Paradigm: Examples from Fisheries and Aquaculture