Greenhouse Green Transitions Workshops 2022

Knowledge institutions such as museums hold the potential to become essential agents in a green transition by cultivating environmental citizenship. This workshop will bring museum educators, curators, and researchers together to discuss the challenges and opportunities maritime museums face as agents in the ongoing green transition: What experience do maritime museums have with education for sustainable development? How can museums historicize human relations with the sea in ways that will contribute to cultivating environmental citizenship? Which conceptual frameworks and empirical research can contribute to a “blue transition” within maritime museums?

Organizers: Vidar Fagerheim Kalsås and Marie-Theres Fojuth

Concepts such as sustainable development, green transition, and circular economy are frequently used interchangeably. At other times, they are argued to be distinctly different. While the United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development makes no specific mention of the terms "circular" or "economy," SDG 12 on Responsible Consumption and Production appears to be as far away as ever. What are the interdependence and overlaps between sustainability and circularity? Is the circular economy a pathway to more sustainable systems that can provide economic benefits while lowering environmental impacts? 

The proposed symposium aims to answer these pressing questions and, thus, advance scientific knowledge through interdisciplinary panel discussions with the key researchers in the areas of sustainability transitions and circular economy.

Read more and register here.

Organizers: Veronika Budovska Lorentzen, Fabian Rocha Aponte, and Sindre Lorentzen.

Given the urgent climate and nature crisis, and the need for society to transition towards greener ways of practice and thought, sustainable development is one of three core multidisciplinary themes in the new Norwegian school curriculum. With this new emphasis on sustainable development, schools and teachers need to develop meaningful understandings and practices around how this could be interpreted and coloured within the different school disciplines.

During this three-day workshop we will attempt to bring together teachers and researchers to discuss experiences and perspectives on how to bring meaningful sustainability thinking into the classroom.  Day 1 will be open to regional in-service and pre-service teachers and will centre around the sharing of interpretations and practices currently found in schools in the region, with the hope to form informal collaborative networks. The subsequent two days are open for educational researchers, and will consist of networking and brainstorming activities, including planning for future co-operation and projects. The expected outcome of the workshop is thus regional competence building, establishment of collaboration and networks, as well as plans for future projects.

Organisers: Frode Skarstein and Tuula Skarstein, in collaboration with the Transforming Education research programme.

Terraforming has traditionally been understood to refer to planets beyond Earth, and the processes necessary to make them habitable for human life. But as the climate crisis renders life on Earth increasingly precarious - desertifying agricultural lands, drying up water supplies and destroying habitats - what we understand to be a ‘habitable’ planet needs rethinking. Some of the proposed solutions to the crisis can be defined as geoengineering: the practice of altering Earth processes to create a greener, more comfortable, and survivable planet for humanity; in other words, terraforming. But the prospect of transforming terra, potentially irreversibly, raises questions of ethics, responsibility, and power. This workshop will facilitate interdisciplinary discussions between natural scientists/practitioners working on terraforming technologies and scholars critically analysing these technologies. What can we learn from each other? How can we ensure these technologies are implemented fairly and safely? And how do we resist these technologies merely maintaining the status quo of environmental destruction and fossil fuel reliance? By holding these conversations, we will foster connections and collaborations across disciplines, and find common ground for our common world.

Organizers: Charlotte Wrigley (University of Stavanger), Adam Searle (Université de Liège), Jonathon Turnbull (University of Cambridge)

Facing planetary environmental crises, green transitions are urgently needed. Whilst global warming, environmental pollution, and loss of biodiversity are some of the continuous and cumulative challenges ahead which demand changes at every scale of our societies. Accordingly, groups like Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future have helped push the urgency of environmental concerns into the public and political agenda. In Scandinavia, technology-driven solutions obtain a prominent position in this discussion, while question developed in the field of Environmental Justice including who is affected by such technological fixes, what they involve, and where they happen have been absent to a certain extent. This workshop gathers scholars from all disciplines to engage with these periphal perspectives on Scandinavian green transitions by examining the structures, systems, and consequences of such shifts in historical and present light. Combining academic lectures, excursions, and discussions, the workshop is an invitation to participate and offer multiple perspectives on green transitions.

Organizers: by Sebastian Lundsteen and Melina Antonia Buns

The HHUiS Business School’s Law Program, the University of Toulouse, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) are meeting Thursday 17 November 2022 in Stavanger in a workshop with the title "Clean Energy in Higher Legal Education: how to make law cleaner?”. The purpose is to discuss and determine how we, the three law programs, can be a part of the green transition and how we can improve legal education to educate “green transition” lawyers. We want to explore how we can create a triangle master degree in law in clean energy.

Today, now then ever, Europe see the need for clean energy produced close to home. In our workshop we will see how we can adopt typical green transition issues into a master of laws program. Typical challenges are permitting to start offshore wind parks (Europe and the US) vs. land based wind/solar parks, connecting your clean energy generation to the grid, contractual issues of selling electricity before it is produced (Power Purchase Agreements), carbon capture and storage technology and technology protection through law, how to finance a clean energy project (project finance and its legal instruments), etc. The issues to be addressed by this workshop are thus many.

Organiser: Kristoffer Svendsen

Our workshop will explore solar rollout in financially constrained contexts, across diverse scales and settings where issues of energy affordability, poverty, and scarcity are particularly salient. Cost declines and quality improvement in solar technologies make fossil fuel displacement techno-economically feasible. Emerging scholarship has, however, identified dynamics of concern in the ongoing transition, such as a bias toward utility-scale projects with consequent regressive socioecological outcomes. Working from diverse disciplines (anthropology, geography, sociology, architecture), the participants of the workshop have contributed to identifying these risks, while placing values of care, dignity, and justice at the heart of the solar transition. The 3-day workshop will thus investigate the risks that surround green, and specifically solar, transitions in financially constrained contexts and co-create solution-oriented approaches. Open sessions, a public panel discussion and a special issue are planned.

Organizers: Berenice Girard and Siddharth Sareen