Karin Edvardsson Björnberg

Scenarios and sustainability: tools for alleviating the gap between municipal means and responsibilities in adaptation planning

Adaptation to climate change often involves long-time frames and uncertainties over the consequences of chosen adaptation measures. In this study, two tools designed for assisting local decision-makers in adaptation planning were tested: socio-economic scenarios and sustainability analysis. The objective was to study whether these tools could be of practical relevance to Swedish municipalities and facilitate local-level climate change adaptation. We found that the municipal planners who participated in the testing generally considered the tools useful and of high relevance, but that more time was needed to use the tools than was provided during the test process.

Gendering local climate adaptation

Empirical evidence suggests that climate change will hit women disproportionately hard. Lack of political power, small economic resources, gender-bound patterns in the division of labour, entrenched cultural patterns and possibly biological differences in heat sensitivity combine to make women and girls particularly vulnerable to extreme weather and other climate-related events. Adaptation responses will likely reduce some of these vulnerabilities. However, just as climate change is likely to impact more severely on women than men, the costs and benefits of adaptation could be unevenly distributed between the sexes. Unless adaptation measures are carefully designed from a gender perspective, they may contribute to preserving prevailing gender inequalities and reinforce womens vulnerability to climate change. Institutions and decision-making processes need to be remodelled so as to guarantee that gender issues are adequately targeted within adaptation. This article identifies a number of methodologies and decision tools that could be used to mainstream gender in local adaptation planning.

Five Areas of Value Judgement in Local Adaptation to Climate Change

Abstract Climate change has generated several new theoretical and policy challenges, many of which concern how local communities ought to adapt to a warmer climate. This paper identifies and analyses a number of value judgements that come to the fore as local authorities adapt to climate change. Five categories of judgements are discussed: evaluation (how should the consequences of adaptation be evaluated?), timing (when should adaptive action be taken?), distribution (how should the benefits and burdens of adaptation be distributed?), procedures (who should be involved in adaptation decision making?), and goal conflicts (how should goal conflicts in adaptation be dealt with?). For each category, further research is needed to assist decision making at the local level.

Integrating social sustainability in engineering education at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate what are perceived to be the main challenges associated with the integration of social sustainability into engineering education at the KTH Roy ...

Rational Goals for the Urban Environment: A Swedish Example

In Sweden, the governments aim to create sustainable urban environments is expressed through the environmental quality objective “A good built environment”. The objective embraces seven sub-goals and is designed to guide central, regional and local authorities’ planning towards urban sustainability. However, for objectives concerning the urban environment, such as the Swedish objective “A good built environment”, to form a solid basis for decision-making, two types of rationality (functionality) conditions ought to be met. First, the objectives should guide and motivate those who are responsible for their implementation. This is applicable when the goals satisfy the criteria of precision, evaluability, approachability and motivity. Second, when the goals are parts of larger goal systems, the goal systems should be coherent. Using the objective “A good built environment” as an empirical basis, this article gives a few examples of how environmental goals can fail to guide and motivate action towards improved urban sustainability.

Setting and Revising Goals

If goals are to fulfil their typical function of regulating action in a way that contributes to an agent’s long-term interests in getting what he or she wants, they need to have a certain stability. At the same time, it is not difficult to imagine situations in which the agent could have a reason to revise his or her goals; goals that are entirely impossible to achieve or approach to a meaningful degree appear to warrant some modification. This chapter addresses the question of when it is rationally justified to reconsider one’s prior goals. In doing so, it enriches the strictly instrumental conception of rationality. Using Bratman’s (1992; 1999) theory of intention and Edvardsson and Hansson’s (2005) theory of rational goal-setting, the chapter critically analyses the steps in the argumentative chain that ought to be considered before it can be concluded that a decision maker has sufficient reason to reconsider her goals. Two sets of revision-prompting considerations are identified: achievability- and desirability-related considerations. It is argued that changes in the agent’s beliefs about the goal’s achievability and/or desirability could give her a prima facie reason to reconsider the goal. However, whether there is sufficient reason—all things considered—to revise the goal hinges on additional factors. Three such factors are discussed: pragmatic, moral and symbolic factors.

Cautious utopias: Environmental Goal-setting with Long Time Frames

Sustainable development is a common goal in the public sector but may be difficult to implement due to epistemic uncertainties and the long time frames required. This paper proposes that some of these problems can be solved by formulating cautious utopias, entailing a relationship between means and goals differing from both utopian and realistic goal-setting. Cautiously utopian goals are believed, but not certain, to be achievable and to remain desirable, but are open to future adjustments due to changing desires and/or factual circumstances. Quality criteria for such goals are suggested.

Self-Defeating Goals

The typical function of goals is to regulate action in a way that furthers goal achievement. Goals are typically set on the assumption that they will help bring the agent(s) closer to the desired s ...

Making climate policy efficient: implementing a model for environmental policy efficiency

We propose a framework for studies of efficiency in environmental policies in the form of a conceptual policy cycle. The policy cycle’s six major elements are goal-setting, choice of policy instruments, enforcement, changes in behaviour of public and private agents, effects of policy measures and, finally, evaluation. Through iterating the policy cycle (or parts of it), efficiency in environmental policies can be improved. We apply the policy cycle to climate policies, both mitigation and adaptation, and identify important areas for future research.

Rational Goals in Engineering Design: The Venice Dams

The rationality of scientific goals has been a much discussed topic in philosophy of science since the publication of Larry Laudan’s Science and Values in 1984 (e.g. Iranzo 1995; Baumslag 1998; Cintora 1999). Until now, significantly less attention has been paid to the rationality of engineering goals, although exceptions exist (e.g. Hughes 2009; Kroes et al. 2009; de Vries 2009). As goals have a central action-directing and coordinating function in the engineering design process, there seems to be a gap in the research. Engineering projects usually start with an identified customer need or desire that is transformed into a set of functional requirements and design specifications for the development of the artefact. These needs, requirements and specifications serve as criteria for the development, testing, evaluation and readjustment of different design solutions. Negotiating and trading off different and often competing requirements is therefore an essential part of the engineering design process.