John Holmberg

Chalmers University of Technology · Department of Earth and Space Sciences

Purposeful transformative change on a level of societal systems, structures and practices is called for in response to contemporary sustainability challenges. Sustainability transition labs and arenas represent a particular set of governance innovations seeking to foster systemic change based on deliberate engagement of multiple actors around compl...

Sustainability is high on the political agenda, with its analytical and practical importance underscored in the field of sustainability transitions. Experiments, arenas, and laboratories are frequently highlighted as real-world objects to investigate sustainability in place. Despite existing lab studies, attempts at comparison at the empirical leve...

Complex sustainability challenges may never be fully solved, rather requiring continuous, adaptive, and reflexive responses over time. Engagement of this nature departs from well-structured problems that entail expected solutions; here, focus shifts toward ill-structured or ill-defined issues characterized by wickedness. In the context of complex c...

North Middle Sweden took part in a pilot “Regions in Industrial Transition”, launched by the European Commission to test new approaches to dealing with industrial transition. By focusing on specific challenges related to industrial transition, the pilot sought to develop new tools for regions and cities.

Purpose While sustainability-oriented education is increasingly placing importance on engaging students in inter- and transdisciplinary learning processes with societal actors and authentic challenges in the centre, little research attends to how and what students learn in such educational initiatives. This paper aims to address this by opening the...

There are growing claims that meaningfully engaging with complex sustainability challenges requires change of a systemic nature. In governing transitions to sustainability, laboratories in real world contexts are growing in presence and promise. Yet, they span an array of contexts, conceptualisations and cases, making it difficult to find and relat...

För att klara de globala utmaningarna menar FN:s Agenda 2030 att det krävs omställning av samhälleliga system. Det räcker inte med marginella justeringar. Ohållbara transport-, energi-, mat- och sjukvårdsystem behöver fasas ut och ersättas med hållbara. För att klara dessa omställningar behövs helhetssyn och samverkan. I denna artikel ger jag min r...

FN:s ledning är tydlig med att Agenda 2030 kräver transformativt och inkluderande ledarskap. Ett ledarskap som kräver att vi tar modiga beslut och flyttar oss ut ur våra ”comfort zones” och välkomnar innovativa sätt att arbeta och tänka. I denna artikel ger jag min reflektion över ledarskapskompetenser i undervisningen och ledarskapets betydelse in...

Denna skrift ger konkreta beskrivningar av några metoder och arbetssätt som "backcasting", "kryssning och expedition", samt praktiska tips på hur man kan ta sig an arbetet med ett medskapande omställningsarbete. SKR har ett uppdrag att stödja kommuner och regioner i att utveckla medborgardialog för ett demokratiskt och socialt hållbart samhälle. F...

Central in leadership for sustainability transitions is the capability to create transformative momentum in a sustainable (desirable) direction, calling for meaningful conversations on sustainable futures. The aim of this study is to develop a conceptual framework to inspire and support such conversations. A qualitative literature review of sustain...

To achieve a sustainable future, a variety of societal systems need to be transformed and new ways of social collaboration created. Higher education institutions play an important role in guiding these changes, through education, research, and outreach. In this paper, we study a lab-based learning environment, the Challenge Lab, where master’s degr...

This book is about developing sustainable businesses. The focus is on early stages – when a business is little more than an idea – and on innovation in an open environment, relatively unconstrained by organizational or other demands. Our setting is primarily the university, and especially the side of the university that nurtures new ideas to grow –...

The concept of perspectives is important in discussions about the multidimensionality of sustainability problems and the need to consider many different aspects when dealing with them. This paper aims to facilitate discussions among both educators and researchers about didactical approaches to developing students’ abilities to deal with the multidi...

We present a model where master students act as change agents, inducing sustainability transitions in socio-technical systems by applying backcasting. Creating transitions in a complex socio-technical system, where universities need to collaborate with the public-and private sector (the triple helix) is often hindered by various kinds of lock-ins....

This book is about developing sustainable businesses. The focus is on early stages – when a business is little more than an idea – and on innovation in an open environment, relatively unconstrained by organizational or other demands. Our setting is primarily the university, and especially the side of the university that nurtures new ideas to grow –...

Consumption-accounted greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (GHGEs) vary considerably between households. Research originating from different traditions, including consumption research, urban planning, and environmental psychology, have studied different types of explanatory variables and provided different insights into this matter. This study integrates...

In the contemporary discussion on society's transformation towards long-term climate targets, it is often implicitly assumed that behavioral changes, unlike technological changes, would lead to reductions in human well-being. However, this assumption has been questioned by researchers, who instead argue that people may live better lives by consumin...

In Sweden, where district heating accounts for a significant share of residential heating, it has been argued that improvements in end-use energy efficiency may be counter-productive since such measures reduce the potential of energy efficient combined heat and power production. In this paper we model how the potential trade-offs between energy sup...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the strategy used for achieving change towards sustainability at Chalmers University of Technology (Chalmers). Examples of how this strategy has been used are described and discussed, and exemplified with different lines of activities in a project on Education for Sustainable Development, the ESD pr...

Substitution between energy and CO2 intensive materials is a potentially important climate mitigation strategy. We compare buildings with concrete frames and wooden frames concerning their life-time carbon dioxide emissions as well as their total material, energy and carbon dioxide costs. By using consistent energy systems scenarios meeting stringe...

Energy efficiency is often identified as the single most important strategy for climate change mitigation. For example, the IIASA-WEC “ecologically driven” scenarios presume global reductions of energy intensities (energy/GDP) by 1.4% per year for the next 50 years, which results in more than twice as large reductions of carbon dioxide emissions as...

Doubts have recurrently been raised on the extent to which energy efficiency can reduce the demand for energy. Improvements in efficiency may cause so-called rebound effects by reducing the prices of energy services as well as by increasing the budget for consumption of other goods and services. The magnitude of such effects is crucial to whether e...

In the environmental movement there is an idea that a reduc-tion in work hours could be good for the environment. Th is idea is especially forceful since shorter work hours have pos-sible positive consequences such as less time pressure and more time for activities which are important for subjective well being like social contacts, volunteer work a...

The development towards higher energy efficiency in the Swedish building sector stagnated in the late 1980s and 1990s. In new buildings the average specific energy use for heating is twice as high as in the best performing buildings 20 years ago. By combining econometric studies and interviews with actors in the building sector we analyse the under...

In this paper, three universities compare their work on the integration of sustainable development into their educational programmes. The purpose is to show examples of how this can be done and to illustrate important generalised success factors. Methods used to achieve embedding of sustainability in curricula through individual interaction with te...

Technology development may play a role in fuel reductions in transport, especially regarding automobiles. But these developments may be off-set by diverting technology gains into non-fuel saving vehicle features – “service attributes”. This paper estimates to what extent technological development, in the Swedish new car fleet, has resulted in lower...

There is a considerable disagreement in the literature on the magnitude of primary energy use and CO2 emissions linked to the production of buildings. In this paper we assess the Swedish building sector using top-down input–output analysis. These top-down results are then disaggregated into sectors and activities, which are compared to results from...

The paper analyses trends in energy use and carbon dioxide emissions in the Swedish building sector between 1970 and 2000 with focus on the development of energy efficiency in the average stock of buildings and in the new construction. The energy efficiency improved throughout the seventies and early eighties, and studies revealed major potentials...

This article describes a stock-based methodology designed to analyze the redistribution of substance stocks to environmental compartments. The methodology is then applied to investigate the requirements and possibilities for avoiding undesired future accumulation of cadmium in Swedish arable soils. A prospective decomposition analysis of human cadm...

mainly with strategies for abatement and costs thereof. The perspective of engineering, materi- als science, and environmental science is very different, of course. In this perspec- tive, transformation processes and attrib- utes are of fundamental importance. In this article, we adopt the latter perspec- tive, for the most part, while attempting t...

Backcasting is a planning methodology that is particularly helpful when problems at hand are complex and when present trends are part of the problems. When applied in planning towards sustainability, backcasting can increase the likelihood of handling the ecologically complex issues in a systematic and coordinated way, and also to foresee certain c...

The natural-step framework is used by over 100 organizations, including many global corporations in Europe and the United States, to provide strategic direction for their sustainability initiatives. The framework is built on the concept of simplicity without reduction. Out of respect for complexity, we designed it to provide a compass, a guide for...

We have studied the Factor X concept through an imagined future lens provided by a framework of basic principles for sustainability for the whole ecosphere. From such a backcasting perspective, three areas seem to be of particular importance when it comes to an application of the Factor X concept for sustainable development.

There are at least two important reasons for why a framework is needed when developing indicators in the context of sustainable development: (1) in order to design relevant indicators and to avoid ad hoc choices of indicators, and (2) to function as a logic structure that makes it easier to survey what have been considered with the indicators. Unfo...

The structure for the incorporation of sustainability aspects within the process of product development is discussed. The sustainable aspects are facilitated through the use of four principles of sustainability. A set of hierarchically structured questions was developed as a tool for the product development process. The hierarchical principles focu...

The choice of system boundaries is essential for regional environmental assessments, i.e., how the environmental pressure associated with flows of energy and materials across regional borders are accounted for. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate the need for explicit and consistent choices of system boundaries by applying a comprehe...

The Ecological Footprint (EF) is a method for estimating the biologically productive area necessary to support current consumption patterns, given prevailing technical and economic processes. By comparing human impact with the planet's limited bioproductive area. this method tests a basic ecological condition for sustainability. The ecological foot...

Harnessing solar energy by using photovoltaic cells has the potential to become a major CO2-free energy source. Materials requirements for the solar cells based on four types of thin-film photovoltaics have been estimated and compared with global reserves, resources and annual refining. The use of solar cells based on Cd, Ga, Ge, In, Ru, Se and Te...

The enlargement of complexity and effects of environmental problems has increased the need for a ‘compass’ to point us in the direction of sustainability. The four principles—System Conditions—which we have earlier described, along with a step-by-step approach to meet them, is such a compass. The System Conditions are first order principles for Sus...

A systematic framework of indicators for sustainability is presented. In our approach there is an emphasis on societal activities that affect nature and on the internal societal resource use, as opposed to environmental quality indicators. In this way the indicators may give a warning signal to an unsustainable use of resources early in the chain f...

Assume that we have borrowed the Earth from our children, and that we one day shall give it back to them and account for what we have done to it. Then we would have to try to restore the damage we have caused. Further, we would have to offer compensation for the damage we have done that we cannot repair at a lower cost. The generational environment...

The stability properties are studied for a Lotka-Volterra type two-prey-one-predator model where the predator is harvested. Two different harvesting strategies are applied, constant harvest quota and constant harvest effort. The temporal behaviour of the population dynamics for different harvest intensities is investigated, which includes phenomena...

There is a need for indicators which capture the essential parts of society in the maladjustments of its physical relations to nature. The socio-ecological indicators should contribute to the control mechanisms that are urgently needed if society is to be able to redirect itself to a path of development which is subordinated to sustainable interact...

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