Suchergebnisse

Foreword : from method to transdisciplinary heuretics / Julie Thompson Klein -- 1. Introduction : sustainability, transdisciplinarity, and the complexity of knowing / Katri Huutoniemi -- 2. Thinking outward : heuristics for systemic understanding of environmental problems / Katri Huutoniemi and Risto Willamo -- 3. Ecosystem services in integrated sustainability assessment : a heuristic view / Jari Lyytimaki and Lars Kjerulf Petersen -- 4. Heuristics for framing sustainability problems in transport / David Banister -- 5. Exploring the space of alternatives : heuristics in sustainability scenarios / Petri Tapio, Mattias Hojer, Asa Svenfelt and Vilja Varho -- 6. From complexity to solvability : the praxeology of transdisciplinary research / Christian Pohl -- 7. Responding to communication challenges in transdisciplinary sustainability science / Troy E. Hall and Michael O'Rourke -- 8. Envisioning solutions : expert deliberation on environmental futures / Vilja Varho and Katri Huutoniemi -- 9. Understanding environmental heuristics : trust and dialogue / Riikka Paloniemi and Annukka Vainio -- 10. Heuristics as cognitive tools for pursuing sustainability / Janne Hukkinen and Katri Huutoniemi -- 11. Transdisciplinarity as sustainability / Robert Frodeman.

Arising out of human-environment interaction, sustainability problems resist disciplinary categories and simple solutions. This book offers a fresh approach to practical and methodological concerns in transdisciplinary environmental and sustainability studies. It illustrates methodological means by which researchers, professionals, and decision-makers can address complex environmental issues. While scientific reasoning is mostly guided by disciplinary traditions, transdisciplinary research rests on other cognitive strategies. As it does not have a ready-made stance toward problems, f.

The purpose of this article is to review the futures studies activities performed in Finland, focusing especially on Finland Futures Research Centre (FFRC). The activities include research, education as well as societal interaction and networking. The FFRC has proceeded from a small unit of three devoted persons in 1992 to one of the key futures research institutes in Europe with about fifty staff members, hundreds of research and developmental projects, and more than a thousand publications. Although acknowledging the variety of futures studies topics and approaches nourished by the researchers, we conclude that facilitating expert-based and stakeholder-based futures studies processes is the key competence of the FFRC. Hybrid methods are continuously developed, meaning combinations of more specific techniques. A proper mix of tools and approaches to gather, analyze, organize, and interpret data is always searched for. At the end of the article, we present four scenarios of the future of the FFRC jointly made by the staff.

The future of businesses is not only orchestrated by emerging trends and megatrends but also to a greater extent struck by surprising events. With the accelerating presence of high-tech innovations and smart technologies, business activities are exposed to an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment. Any unexpected changes in the environment could lead to the malfunction or even collapse of a company, a business, or even an industry. Discerning the seeds of change and anticipating the potential disruptions in the external environment is a precondition for avoiding potential risks and threats. The present study contributes to the conceptual and methodological discussion of disruptive transformation by identifying, analyzing, and interpreting the potential disruptive factors in the external business environment. The venture is undertaken through the lens of probing into the dynamism of China's e-commerce industry, considering its growing influence both domestically and abroad. Any unexpected disruptions would result in a significant ripple effect on interrelated businesses, industries, and even economies. The research adopts a combined mode of qualitative and quantitative methods in the form of horizon scanning and a Consumer Delphi study. Horizon scanning collects futures signals indicating the seeds of change (i.e., weak signals) and potential disruptions (i.e., wild cards), whereas Delphi study solicits the evaluations on the degree of likelihood and impact of the collected factors from an expert panel. As a result, twenty-seven potential disruptive factors are discovered, categorized, estimated, and discussed.

The decarbonisation of the economy is a well-established international trend in environmental research. Decarbonisation is normally defined as a decreasing carbon intensity of the economy, measured by dividing the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions with the gross domestic product (GDP). The paper compares two aspects of the carbon intensity of the economy: (1) The total CO2 emission intensity of the economy and (2) the transport CO2 emission intensity of the economy. Data is gathered from the current fifteen European Union (EU15) countries from 1960 to 1999. The countries are grouped by cluster analysis and regional patterns of the groupings are analysed. It can be concluded that while the total CO2 intensity of the economy has decreased, the transport CO2 intensity has in fact increased in the EU15 countries. Regarding the whole period, only Ireland and Austria showed decreasing transport CO2 intensity. It seems, that in the 1990's a change in the trend was achieved also in Denmark, Finland, Sweden and United Kingdom. In the United States, transport CO2 intensity began to decrease already in the mid 1970's, but still in 1999 the figures were approximately two times greater than that of the EU15. Key words: carbon dioxide emissions, transport, carbon intensity, european union