The main objective of the project is to promote lifestyles that are consistent with the 1.5°C climate target and to facilitate the transformations envisaged in the Paris Agreement and the EU Green Deal. To this end, the project develops guidance for policymakers, businesses, civil society organizations, and private households based on scientific evidence on how lifestyle choices affect carbon footprints and how structural contexts enable or constrain options for sustainable lifestyles.

Microbial biotechnology - sustainability benefits and social participation

Participation for a Sustainable Common Good

The project investigates under which conditions religion can serve as a resource for understanding in the climate policy of the European Union and the United Nations. Find out more here.

The research project examines the localization of environmental norms in the implementation process of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in India.

One of the core issues in the globalization debate has been the question of the benefits and costs of globalization and their distribution. A fundamental problem with such inquiries, however, is their choice of indicators. A joint research project of Prof. Doris Fuchs, Prof. Markus Lederer, Prof. Bernd Schlipphak, Prof. Oliver Treib and Dr. Le Anh Long seeks to answer this question.

One focus of the chair's work is research on consumption corridors and strongly sustainable consumption. Specifically, we focus on the question of how and under what conditions a good life is possible for all those living now or in the future within the planetary boundaries. To this end, we focus on consumption minima and maxima as conditions for satisfying needs, as well as necessary structural framework conditions and social processes.

 

This project analysis the interests of corporate actors in the regulation of business and human rights, and how these interests might interact with the sources of corporate power.


 

The project MOVER (Factors of Success and Failure in Organized Consumer Participation) is a joint project in cooperation with the HHU Düsseldorf, the University of Siegen and the University of Cologne. Organized consumer participation (e.g. repair cafés, food sharing) manifests itself in both formal and non-formal, small as well as large, local as well as (inter)national forms of organization. In practice, these organizations are often confronted with a wide variety of challenges and sometimes threaten to fail because of them. This project investigates which factors hinder or promote the success of organized consumer participation in order to derive recommendations for action for the organizations themselves as well as for the framework-creating consumer (education) policy.

The RESOLVE project (Reducing Returns in Online Retailing - Approaches to Shaping More Sustainable Consumer Behavior) is a joint project in cooperation with the HHU Düsseldorf, the University of Siegen and the University of Cologne. Return shipping and handling processes of returned goods in online retailing pollute the climate and the environment, lead to considerable costs on the part of online retailers and indirectly increase market prices for consumers. The aim of the joint project is to derive design recommendations for the preventive reduction of returns at the individual consumer level as well as for political and legal framework conditions that promote sustainability.

This PhD project is situated within the nexus of climate and energy policy and the governance of sustainable production and consumption systems, as well as in the empirical context of German climate and energy model regions.

Drawing on ideas of environmental virtue ethics and environmental citizenship, this research project argues that in order for citizens to achieve sustainability-promoting outcomes in participatory processes, the virtue of "green" political judgment formation – an adaption of the Aristotelian phronesis – is indispensable. Following the elaboration of this concept, the project bridges the gap to political practice by examining practical framework conditions for successful "green" political judgment formation.

The development of new applications of machine learning and "artificial intelligence" in the last decade have generated great expectations in the potential of these technologies, also in relation to the transformation towards sustainability. As part of the work package "AI and Sustainability" of the project "Interdisciplinary Teaching Programme on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence" at the WWU, target group-specific communication and teaching materials are developed, implemented and evaluated on the basis of the state of research on sustainability implications, challenges and potentials of AI in connection with the didactics of Education for Sustainable Development.