Sina Leipold

• Prof. Dr.
• Head of Department at Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research

While global resource use and GHG emissions keep increasing, the circular economy (CE) has ascended to the forefront of global policy-, business- and research agendas. Through narrower, slower and more closed material cycles, the CE aims to avoid waste and reduce virgin raw material demand, thereby potentially also mitigating energy demand and GHG...

Circular economy (CE) is gaining traction in cities as an approach to reducing local and global environmental impacts. Yet, how effective are these strategies in terms of their environmental impacts? To find out, we took a deep dive into 30 CE policies from cities in high-income countries across Europe, the Americas, and Oceania. We assessed the re...

Full text available at makovlabs.com As fossil fuels are phased out in favor of renewable energy, electric cars and other low-carbon technologies, the future clean energy system is likely to require less overall mining than the current fossil-fueled system. However, material extraction and waste flows, new infrastructure development, land-use chang...

Sustainability scientists are increasingly expressing concerns about the lack of creativity and reflexivity, vital elements for driving sustainability transformations, in their profession. We argue that these concerns stem from established scientific practices of knowledge accumulation and interdisciplinary research, often neglecting the influence...

To effectively navigate out of the climate crisis, a new interdisciplinary approach is needed to guide and facilitate research that integrates diverse understandings of how transitions evolve in intertwined social–environmental systems. The concept of tipping points, frequently used in the natural sciences and increasingly in the social sciences, c...

Numerous challenges – from population increase to climate change – threaten the sustainable development of cities and call for a fundamental change of urban development and green-blue resource management. Urban forests are vital in this transition, as they provide various ecosystem services and allow to re-shape and re-think cities. Based on a Euro...

The assessment of persistence (P), bioaccumulation (B), and toxicity (T) of a chemical is a crucial first step at ensuring chemical safety and is a cornerstone of the European Union’s chemicals regulation REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals). Existing methods for PBT assessment are overly complex and cumbers...

Park, Leahey and Funk – PLF – present a thought-provoking contribution to tracking scientific progress by studying the ‘disruptiveness’ of academic publications and patents in a large-N analysis. Their effort – published in Nature 613 (2023) – is timely because the best possible knowledge is needed to effectively address the grand challenges that s...

The current enthusiasm for the circular economy (CE) offers a unique opportunity to advance the impact of research on sustainability transitions. Diverse interpretations of CE by scholars, however, produce partly opposing assessments of its potential benefits, which can hinder progress. Here, we synthesize policy-relevant lessons and research direc...

This Research Agenda has been developed as part of the European Forest Institute (EFI) Network Fund call for the preparation of a Green Book of Biocities and a Research Agenda for Biocities of the Future. The Research Agenda is intended as a foundational document for further research and initiatives to be undertaken by the new EFI Biocities Facilit...

Lock-in mechanisms are major hurdles to sustainability transitions. Scholars identified various types of lock-ins; however, their dynamics and interactions remain underexplored. Using the case of food packaging, this study enhances the conceptual understanding and empirical analysis of lock-ins and their interactions from a socio-technical perspect...

Following a long‐standing and highly contested policy debate, in June 2021, the German parliament passed the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act requiring mandatory due diligence (MDD) of large companies, holding them accountable for the impacts of their supply chain operations abroad. Applying the discursive agency approach and using evidence from poli...

China and the European Union (EU) signed the first international circular economy (CE) agreement shortly after China issued the ‘Waste Ban’ (WB) on the import of 24 categories of solid waste. While the WB gained global attention, limited research addresses its political implications for international CE. Based on 72 expert interviews, 52 documents...

A paradigm shift is needed in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) to progress from traditional pollutant removal to resource recovery. However, whether this transformation produces overall environmental benefits will depend on the efficient and sustainable use of resources by emerging technologies. Given that many of these technologies are still be...

Understanding the dynamics of stability and change is key to accelerate sustainability transitions. This paper aims to advance and inspire sustainability transition research on this matter by collecting insights from interpretative environmental discourse literature. We develop a heuristic that identifies and describes core discursive elements and...

Seeking to meet sustainability targets, cities are promoting a number of circular economy initiatives. Whether or not these actions help cities to approach sustainable resource management is often unclear. To identify, prioritize and monitor resource-efficient strategies, cities can look for targets and indicators among the Sustainable Development...

Longstanding research on wood cascading has identified a variety of factors to enable a more efficient, circular use of forest-based products in Europe. We provide an overview of these factors and their interactions. Based on our review, two of the most critical barriers for wood cascading are: 1) Competition between energy and material uses of was...

Circular economy is a policy concept that requires mainstreaming to enable sustainable development through cleaner production and consumption. Unique among CE frontrunners, China's CE implementation is well-documented to be a major experimentation program at different scales. It therefore offers one example of CE upscaling. However, while China is...

France's Law Against Food Waste has become an international model for sustainable food policy. Many consider the law to combine economic efficiency with environmental protection and social equity. Yet, stakeholder narratives cast doubt on whether this French circular economy law really contributes to social justice in the long run. A discourse anal...

Scholars have argued that circular economy (CE) must be upscaled and globalized to address excessive resource extraction and waste generation. Many CE practitioners consider the first international CE agreement between China and the EU a milestone towards such an effort. This analysis shows why this expectation is premature. European and Chinese st...

Urban agriculture comes with its own share of environmental impacts. Circular strategies like rainwater harvesting promise to reduce these impacts, but we find that not all strategies are resource efficient and environmentally effective. The most eco-friendly and circular strategies for urban agriculture, based on our case of a Mediterranean tomato...

Circular economy is gaining momentum in cities. To ensure a sustainable circular economy, measuring the environmental performance of circular economy strategies is indispensable. However, do current environmental assessments support the prioritisation of sustainable circular strategies in cities? We find that environmental assessments miss out on...

Halving food waste is a prominent target in European policymaking to conserve increasingly strained food resources. However, we find that expanding the scope of political action to include dietary changes and complement targets with resource footprints hold greater resource-saving potential while avoiding trade-offs. Comparing food waste and dietar...

How a circular economy (CE) can promote social equity remains largely unknown. We analyze how CE narratives affect interpretations of problems and actions on waste in the French food sector, particularly around the Loi Garot. We identify CE narratives that challenge the sector's previous discourse of a social and solidarity economy (SSE) by advanci...

The current enthusiasm for circular economy (CE) offers a unique opportunity to advance the impact of research on sustainability transitions. Diverse interpretations of CE by scholars, however, produce partly opposing assessments of its potential benefits, which can hinder progress. Here, we synthesize policy-relevant lessons and research direction...

To feed future populations on ever-scarcer natural resources, policy initiatives aim to decrease resource footprints of food consumption. While adopting healthier diets has shown great potential to reduce footprints, current political initiatives primarily address strategies to reduce food waste, with the target of halving food waste at retail and...

It is widely acknowledged that policies for a more sustainable society require narratives outside the status quo. This contribution studies the EU’s environmental policy narrative of a circular economy (CE), which many consider promising in this respect. The results demonstrate that the CE narrative was created to transform EU policy discourses ‘fr...

Local food production through urban agriculture (UA) is promoted as a means to make cities more sustainable. However, UA does not come free of environmental impacts. In this sense, optimizing urban resources through circular economy principles offers the opportunity to close loops and improve production systems, but an assessment of these systems t...

China and the EU recently established an agreement to develop a Circular Economy (CE), a (re)emerging socio-economic framework to address growing challenges of global environmental change. Up to now, there is limited research addressing the implications of a joint CE framework following the China-EU agreement. Based on 72 expert interviews, 52 docu...

Many consider the recent development of a ‘circular economy’ (CE) between the EU and China a milestone towards global efforts to address pressing environmental problems of extraction, resource use and waste management. The implications of EU-China’s efforts to coordinate on CE for the development of international environmental politics, however, ha...

We compare two of the most commonly used food packaging materials, PET and corrugated cardboard, using the example of fruit punnets. The results show that a corrugated cardboard fruit punnet generates less harmful climate emissions than an equivalent PET fruit punnet due to the greenhouse gas potential of biological raw materials. If PET fruit punn...

Many stakeholders from politics, business and civil society are disappointed with the German Packaging Act. They feel it makes a comparatively small contribution to a circular economy. This study provides explanations for the disappointment: • Policy-making became entangled in disputes between proponents of a private and a public system for waste...

Understanding environmental politics is crucial for sustainability transitions. We study the transition politics of the shift to a circular economy in the German packaging sector, particularly the curious case of the 2019 German Packaging Act. While the policy was born out of the unanimous wish for radical regulatory change, all stakeholders evalua...

Circular economy policies are on the rise globally. Several studies point to a large potential of digitalization and sharing practices for realizing a circular economy. Yet, little empirical evidence is available on the aims, self-perceptions and business models of sharing-practice providers. This study scrutinizes the providers' view on their prac...

Understanding environmental politics is crucial for sustainability transitions. We study the transition politics of the shift to a circular economy in the German packaging sector, particularly the curious case of the 2019 German Packaging Act. While the policy was born out of the unanimous wish for radical regulatory change, all actors evaluate the...

Since the mid-1990s, discourse analysis has become an increasingly established framework in environmental policy analysis. The field has diversified in terms of conceptual approaches, methods, topics, and geographies. This special issue revisits trends and traditions regarding theoretical and methodological approaches, ‘old’ and ‘new’ discourses, a...

The voluntary/mandatory divide is a constant feature of scholarly debates on corporate accountability for sustainability in global supply chains. A widely held assumption is that the addition of state authority to private transnational governance in global supply chains will “harden” accountability and, thus, promote more sustainable production. Th...

Understanding how a circular economy (CE) can reduce environmental pressures from economic activities is crucial for policy and practice. Science provides a range of indicators to monitor and assess CE activities. However, common CE activities, such as recycling and eco-design, are contested in terms of their contribution to environmental sustainab...

In the original publication of this article, the equally contributed article note was missed.

The circular economy has become the focus of a recent major EU policy program, which aims at the transformation towards environmentally sustainable modes of production and consumption. This has moved parts of the forest and related bio-based industries to envision their operations in terms of a circular economy. However, the meaning and implementat...

The Paris Agreement heralds a new era in international climate governance. Yet, the Agreement's implementation rulebook is still under negotiation. During this transition, from the Kyoto Protocol to the new regime under the Paris Agreement, many non-state actors are facing a high level of uncertainty. In particular, actors in the voluntary carbon m...

For decades there has been a controversial debate over how far religious faith communities are specifically engaged in ecological practices (EP). Therefore we studied four Austrian and two German Benedictine monasteries religious ethics and spirituality as a means of a driving force for initiating EP. We draw upon theories of organizational learnin...

The European Union has recently introduced the ’circular economy’ as a high-level strategy to move our societies beyond the limits to growth. In the eyes of European policy makers, we will reach a circular economy through business innovation or the promotion of existing sustainable business models based on circular economy principles. Yet, we know...

Circular economy (CE) is gaining popularity at different levels with the promise of creating more sustainable processes. In this context, cities are implementing a number of initiatives that aim to turn them into sustainable circular systems. Whether these initiatives achieve their sustainability goals, however, is largely unknown. Nevertheless, as...

In the last decade illegal logging has triggered the attention of policy makers and scholars of international forest governance. The issue is multifaceted, involving aspects of social and environmental sustainability, development, trade, access to markets and competitiveness. A vivid academic debate has resulted, exploring the nexus between markets...

Interpretive discourse analysis commonly claims to address the interrelation between actors and discourses. However, the analytical focus of most approaches is on structures (discourses) while much less attention is paid to agency. This paper explicitly addresses discursive agency in two steps. First, we systematically review theoretical and analyt...

SUMMARY Discursive Agency has hardly been analyzed in the study of (forest) policy. Discourse approaches applied in forest policy analysis all conceptualize a dialectic understanding of structures/discourses and agents (and partially institutions). Yet, this theoretically powerful dialectic is rarely put into research practice. One reason is a ce...

Changing societal expectations have influenced the way industries involved in the development or extraction of natural resources conduct their operations around the world. Increasingly, communities are demanding more involvement in decision-making around such operations, have expectations of receiving a greater share of the benefits from these oper...

Key words: Discourse analysis, policy analysis, actor-centred, policy change, approach/framework

The Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) is an influential theoretical framework for the analysis of policymaking processes, in particular agenda setting. It has inspired numerous empirical applications, which result in substantially different interpretations, for instance, of what exactly the “streams” encompass, how policy entrepreneurship is practic...

There is a new trend in international forest policy science. Over the past decade the term “discourse” has entered the field. Discourse analytical approaches and methods have become increasingly popular among scholars dealing with forests and their governance. When consulting the growing literature, one quickly notes the inconsistent use of the ter...