Sustainability Notes
Our Sustainability Notes showcase some of the best work produced recently by our students.
These notes are summaries of longer essays written as part of MASUS courses.
Latest Blogs
The atmospheric commons
by Rodrigo Autric
The way in which political theory, environmental science and economics portray different realities of the atmosphere as a shared resource can help us understand the past and identify different realities, further showing how these could be operationalised to change the present towards a more sustainable governance of the ‘atmospheric commons’.
Urban gardens as collective action
by Isabel Jiménez Alonso
In ‘Collective action and social contagion’, authors Michal Shur-Ofry and Ofer Malcai use a complex systems approach is used to determine the categorization of urban gardens in Jerusalem as “Institutions of Collective Action” – in Elinor Ostrom’s terms – and whether they can scale up from bottom-up initiatives at the micro level to affect patterns and behaviors of the system at the macro scale.
Geopolitics of renewable energy in Europe
by Isabel Jiménez Alonso
The European Green Deal establishes a reduction of at least 55% of GHG emissions along with carbon neutrality by 2050. Critics of the European strategy have pointed out the need to include degrowth in the debate, to reduce demand and overall energy intensity to meet climate objectives and avoid an environmental catastrophe. In any case, despite its ambitious targets for the energy transition, the European strategy has important limitations and policy implications.