Radboud University
Many international institutions, such as the United Nations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognise that a societal transformation towards sustainability is needed to curb climate change, bend the curve of biodiversity loss and reach other environmental and social sustainability goals. The multitude of environmental crises and lack of progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals emphasises the need to change from our current business-as-usual attitude towards inherently sustainable practices.
In this project, we aim to analyse climate change mitigation strategies (e.g. electric mobility, biobased energy and materials, and carbon credits) and their potential to contribute to societal sustainability transformations, or perhaps hinder true transformations. Topics that we aim to include in the analysis are impacts of a climate change mitigation strategy on land and resource scarcity, implications for global and intergenerational justice, and how the strategies support or hinder the achievement of other sustainability targets.
To do so, we need a methodological framework that allows integrating methods and expertise from different disciplines from the natural and social sciences. Methods that can be part of the framework include, but are not limited to, discourse analysis, policy reconstruction, life cycle assessment, multi-regional input-output modelling, and statistical data and text analysis. You will develop this framework, together with your supervisors, and apply it to one or more climate change mitigation strategies to study their transformative potential. This project gives you much freedom and responsibility to steer the direction of the research.
You will be encouraged to work closely with your colleagues in the department and university-wide, as well as with others in the field. You will participate in relevant conferences and workshops, and you will communicate your findings through publications in peer-reviewed journals. Part of your workload (10%) will consist of teaching activities at our institute, assisting staff members in their courses at the MSc level (in English). You will work under the supervision of Dr Carlijn Hendriks and Prof. Birka Wicke. Upon successful completion of the research project, you will be awarded a PhD degree from Radboud University. We particularly encourage applications from underrepresented groups.
