At flabbergasting speed, we currently see a very unappetising authoritarian turn in the United States under President Donald Trump. Numerous executive orders, often on questionable legal basis, target international cooperation and funding for academia, which, in the mind of “strongmen”, merit little attention, anyways. (mehr …)
The project Sustainable Development Pathways Achieving Human Well-Being While Safeguarding the Climate and Planet Earth (SHAPE) was launched during a Kick-Off Meeting at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) from 12 to 14 November 2019. The project aims to develop and analyse Sustainable Development Pathways (SDPs) that achieve the SDGs in 2030 and maintain sustainable development to reach the Paris climate goals by 2100. DIE’s project partners of SHAPE are the PIK, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS), the Stockholm Resilience Center (SRC), the University of Utrecht, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
The primary goals of the meeting were to coordinate the next steps in delivering the tasks as stipulated by the project, to identify cross-cutting issues that would require more strategic interactions by the partners as well as discuss the content of the different deliverables. The German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) through the Programme Environmental Governance and Transformation to Sustainability leads the work package on governing the transformation. In this regard, DIE particularly contributes to research on governing transformations to sustainability and on policy integration. In addition, DIE intends to highlight social science perspectives to improve the relevance and impact of modeling, scenario-building and projections to policy-making by providing context for assumptions, narratives and targets.
The project SHAPE is part of AXIS, an ERA-NET initiated by JPI Climate, and funded by FORMAS (Sweden), FFG/BMWFW (Austria), DLR/BMBF, NWO (Netherlands) and RCN (Norway) with co-funding by the European Union.
