Wolfgang Weimer-Jehle

A normative-functional concept of sustainability and its indicators

Often concepts of sustainability have been criticised for being theoretically ill-founded and lacking practical impact. This paper provides a new theoretical foundation of sustainable development, which is based on a coherent set of three normative and functional categories: systems integrity, justice and quality of life. From these three categories indicators for sustainability are deduced that allow to measure progress in sustainable development. Based on the set of criteria and its indicators, interdependencies between the different aspects of sustainability are analysed with the help of expert judgements and cross impact analysis. This paper concludes with sketching a deliberative approach to generate future strategies for sustainability.

Familial and societal causes of juvenile obesity—a qualitative model on obesity development and prevention in socially disadvantaged children and adolescents

AimThe issue of excess weight and obesity among our young people is currently under discussion as one of the most serious problems in public health. Extensive work has been done to analyse the problem, to indicate the drivers, and to create prevention programmes. Much research remains to be done in the field of modelling the complex impact network of familial and societal influences on juvenile obesity. To achieve this, the forecasts and results issued by the various disciplines must be integrated. The aim of our work has been to create a causal-loop model of obesity in socially disadvantaged children and adolescents that allows qualitative simulation, group-specific risk assessment, as well as the identification of key factors for prevention.Subjects and MethodsThe model was created in cooperation with 18 experts from the field of obesity research. The participants were drawn from eight different disciplines including medicine, sociology, and prevention. Four expert workshops pinpointed 43 main obesity drivers at the individual, familial, and societal level; these were rated according to their causal interdependence and impact. The computer-based method of cross-impact balance analysis was used to evaluate the model and to produce risk profiles for different societal and individual context situations.ResultsThe model analysis reveals that there is no one single key factor that can be expected to act as an effective prevention factor for every scenario. Instead, both the risks and the effectiveness of prevention measures depend strongly on the specific characteristics of an individual’s own environment.ConclusionConsequently, it would appear sensible to approach the design of prevention programmes from a group-specific, multi-factor and multi-level perspective.

AMIRIS: An Agent-Based Simulation Model for the Analysis of Different Support Schemes and Their Effects on Actors Involved in the Integration of Renewable Energies into Energy Markets

Electricity generation from renewables in Germany has now reached an energy economically relevant magnitude. The further increase of electricity from renewable energy sources is driven by the Energy Concept enacted by the Federal Government in 2010 with the goal of transforming the energy system into a renewable based one by 2050. In order to achieve the political targets reorganization in terms of technical, organizational and financial aspects is needed. The transition and structural adjustments are characterized by a huge variety of actors, who are connected through complex interactions with one another and who react very differently to changes in the energy economic environment. We will present the agent-based simulation model AMIRIS (Agent-based Model for the Integration of Renewables Into the Power System), which can be used as policy design tool to foster the integration of renewable energy sources into the electricity market.

Aspekte der Qualität

Kriterienauswahl und Bewertungsverfahren sind Grundbestandteile von Entscheidungen. Dies gilt im Besonderen dort, wo komplexe Zusammenhange vermittelt werden sollen, wie sie sich beispielsweise bei Planung und Umsetzung grostechnischer Bauten fur erneuerbare Energien (EE) in Landschaften regelmasig stellen. Auf der Basis einer Darstellung der Zusammenhange unter dem Aspekt der ‚Landschaftsqualitat‘ stellen die Verfasser zwei Verfahren zur Losung dieses Problems vor, wurdigen diese kritisch und formulieren aufgabenspezifischen Forschungsbedarf.

Analysis of the energy consumption of private households in Germany using multi-level cross-impact balance approach - Data

Many studies stress the needs of interdependence analysis under the special conditions of multidisciplinary systems that include social systems. This applies, in particular, to scenarios on future energy demand and supply. Using the example of the residential sector in Germany we provide information on factors and their possible outcomes taking multidisciplinary aspects into account. In addition, futures are presented reflecting consistent combinations of the outcomes of the selected factors. These futures can be used as storylines for further analyses (see (S. Vögele, P. Hansen, W-R. Poganietz, S. Prehofer, W. Weimer-Jehle) [1]).

The Normative-Functional Concept of Sustainability and the Question of Indicator Weights

Indicator sets are widely used in sustainability research and policy debates to assess the effects of sustainability policies and to rate the desirability of technology options. For instance, the German government periodically issues ‘progress reports’ showing the recent development of sustainability indicators in the country [3], while MCDA approaches use indicator sets to aggregate positive and negative characteristics of a technology to a sustainability score [4, 8]. Such applications of indicator sets are generally associated with a specific problem, that is, they pinpoint both favourable and unfavourable developments and technology characteristics; thus, any attempt to arrive at an overall conclusion inevitably requires the indicators and their underlying criteria to be weighed up against each other, thereby introducing the question of indicator weights. The article describes how the concept of normative-functional sustainabilty can be used to derive a rough classification of indicator weights.