The Seminar is focusing on Human flourishing within planetary boundaries. It is going to take place on Tuesday, 13th of June from 1 pm to 2 pm at the meeting room: D5.3.033. Sigrid Stagl ist the Head of the Institute for Ecoligical Economics.

Abstract

For decades, natural scientists and ecological economists have argued that there are important biophysical limits and that trespassing them is dangerous. The limited capacity of the atmosphere to assimilate greenhouse gases is an important, yet certainly not the only biophysical limit. The international community spent over two decades negotiating legally binding rules on how to rein in global emissions. With the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals and especially the Paris Climate Agreement boundaries are being built into national and international institutions and are shaping economic governance. Yet what do biophysical boundaries mean for human development? The pathways to sustainability that are open to us within biophysical limits differ in social, environmental and economic characteristics. What these pathways have in common is the quest for human flourishing. The paper aims at reframing human development as the provision of services that can be generated from different stock-flow combinations. We present two frameworks, the capability approach and the energy services approach, and conceptualise them in terms of stock-flow interactions and explore their respective suitability for guiding decisions towards pathways of human flourishing within planetary boundaries.

The Ecological Economics Research Seminars take place at the EcolEcon Instituts meeting room D5.3.033.

Have a look at the Ecological Economics Seminar Series (IEES).

Everybody is welcome to join. Please register with emanuele.campiglio@wu.ac.at

@Photo: Chris Riedy