David Harnesk

Lund University | LU · Centre for Sustainability Studies

A new wave of encroachments is unfolding in Northern Sweden on the lands of Indigenous Sámi reindeer pastoralists. Even if the State and corporations may accept that landscape transformations represent threats to reindeer pastoralists' cultural and livelihood practices, attempts to redress these grievances often involve money to cover costs associa...

The impacts of climate change on rural cultures and livelihoods depend on how the resulting complex biophysical processes may transform people’s land use practices. We argue that research can incorporate local concerns of compound hazards through deterministic rather than probabilistic approaches to better understand the multiple causations involve...

This paper argues that Sámi reindeer pastoralism in Sweden is highly stressed during the critical snow cover periods due to large-scale human interventions, especially forestry, and that these have over time significantly worsened the ecological conditions for natural grazing-based responses to changing snow conditions caused by climate change. Inf...

Sustainability science (SS) is diverse field of problem-driven and solution-oriented research that is still developing. The further maturation of the field relies on its practitioners formulating alternative paradigms to use-inspired knowledge production to facilitate comparison and reasoned judgment on what constitutes scientific best practices. I...

The question whether a single extreme climate event, such as a hurricane or heatwave, can be attributed to human induced climate change has become a vibrant field of research and discussion in recent years. Proponents of the most common approach (probabilistic event attribution) argue for using single event attribution for advancing climate policy,...

It has become quite common in environmental sustainability research to promote the influencing of so-called inner dimensions of individuals as means to address pressing environmental problems such as climate change, what we refer to as the Inward Turn. We argue that the conceptual foundations of the Inward Turn, an extreme form of methodological in...

Sociological insights are often underutilized in sustainability science. To further strengthen its commitment to interdisciplinary problem-driven, solutions-oriented research, sustainability science can better incorporate fundamental sociological conceptions into its core. We highlight four aspects of sociological thought that we consider crucial f...

The idea of ‘Sustainability as a Real Utopia’ elaborated on here adapts sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s emancipatory social science and is a heuristic informed by critical realism and social theory for interdisciplinary research on viable alternatives that move society towards achieving sustainability. Starting from the proposition that many environ...

The growth of biomass-based markets for transport fuel is an expanding geographical process driven by regulation in the European Union (EU). Based on a certification scheme that illustrates the regulatory mechanisms in the EU's liquid biofuel market, this article explains how larger processes of territorialisation and uneven development interact wi...

Reflexivity is arguably an important aspect of doing sustainability research. The inter- and transdisciplinary character of sustainability research, as well as its change-oriented agenda, require scholars to reflect on their role as researchers, their research focus and methodology, and its relation to academia and society. Using focus groups with...

The global extraction of minerals is commonly located in areas populated by indigenous people; and while conflicts between multinational corporations and local activists and indigenous people are widespread today, the understanding of their dynamics are lacking. The Swedish government's encouragement to an expanding mining industry has caused resis...

The global extraction of minerals is commonly located in areas populated by indigenous people; and while conflicts between multinational corporations and local activists and indigenous people are widespread today, the understanding of their dynamics are lacking. The Swedish government's encouragement to an expanding mining industry has caused resis...

The book “Energy and Transport in Green Transitions – Perspectives on Ecomodernity” deals with the societally and scientifically crucial topic of energy and climate change mitigation. The book starts by setting high ambitions as the authors attempt “to go beyond both the extremism of the anti-capitalist critique and the radical enthusiasm of techno...

The European Union plays a globally influential role in environmental legislation, with policies and regulation rooted in particular norms. Through a narrative on regulatory capitalism, ecological modernization, and diffusion, we trace how the promotion of renewable energy in transport through subsidies, mandatory targets, and prescriptive criteria...

Despite promises that they can contribute toward more environmentally beneficial transportation there are many sustainability concerns about liquid transport biofuels. In response to pressure from civil society, the European Union (EU) has introduced sustainability criteria for biofuels. A hybrid regulatory system involving state and non-state acto...

The project can be summarized in the following major points: 1) Through the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive fossil fuels in the transport sector are replaced with biofuels produced from land-based resources. The EU requires import to reach its 10% target for renewables in the transport sector. 2) The sustainability criteria have improved the tra...

The chapter examines the integrated Nordic power market and its linkages to renewable energy technology (RET) deployment for power production. It has two purposes. First, it aims to improve the understanding of the expansion of the Nordic power market and integration and deployment of RET. Secondly, it takes lessons from the Nordic experience that...