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Research Unit Sustainability and Climate PolicyProf. Dr. Felix Ekardt, LL.M., M.A. |
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Research Unit Sustainability and Climate PolicyProf. Dr. Felix Ekardt, LL.M., M.A. |
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Recent Publications and Speeches
During the last years, the Research Unit Sustainability and Climate Policy has done a lot of research on questions of phosphorus and scarcity of natural resources, as well as on land-use and climate change - from a transdisciplinary point of view. See, among other papers, here.
Since 2007, Felix Ekardt has given speeches and presentations on some 50 international conferences on questions of sustainability, climate change, justice, human rights, phosphorus scarcity, land-use, etc. For details and also for forthcoming speeches, see the list of presentations.
The Research Unit Sustainability and Climate Policy has done a lot of research on the normative grounds of sustainability - respectively on the theoretical basis of both ethics and law. The most informative is the big German volume "Theorie der Nachhaltigkeit", but there is also a number of English papers. See, among other papers, here.
Climate change poses problems for mankind that have never existed in such dimensions. For that reason alone we have think about solutions that have never been proposed before. Unfortunately, we currently do not succeed, neither in Germany, the ostensible precursor of climate protection, nor in Europe. We are a great climate chatterbox, yet real action in policy-making, economy, and civil society is still expandable. We get lost in predictions of catastrophe scenarios and in uncountable small (but too ineffective) steps. Current conceptions for a real climate reversal, which must go beyond differentiated but often hardly successful trifle, and the causal analyses that explain why humanity seems to run blindly into the largest catastrophe of its history (and how that could be changed) are inadequate. This also applies to the required moral assessment of the disaster that we impose on our world, including the painful balancing problems that lie before us. The Copenhagen Conference on global climate protection will presumably not change anything. There, too, progress will be made – if there will be some at all – in minute steps only. However, far reaching steps are required: a real climate reversal, if not a climate revolution. This requires a firm foundation in a theory of justice.
Downloadable texts: