Publications

Xuemei Bai, Giles B. Sioen, Şiir Kilkiş, Timon McPhearson, Zeenat Niazi, Jago Dodson, Tri Atmaja, Kensuke Fukushi, Niki Frantzeskaki, Harini Nagendra, Wanyu Shih, Thomas Elmqvist, Tischa Muñoz-Erickson, Xiangzheng Deng, Burak Güneralp, Shuaib Lwasa, Noboru Zama. 2025. Reimagining urban science for global sustainability: Five strategic research areas. Global Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2025.10025

Cities, as complex systems, are faced with increasingly diverse and connected challenges across social, economic, environmental, and health domains. To help cities address these challenges, the Future Earth Urban Knowledge-Action Network developed a cross-disciplinary urban research agenda through expert elicitations and extensive consultation. Five research themes to guide urban sustainability research were identified includi...

Erica von Essen, Minh-Xuan A. Truong. 2025. Multitasking Moose Migration: Examining media multimodality in slow-TV nature programming. Telematics and Informatics Reports. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.teler.2025.100186

Media multitasking has become an integrated part of much media consumption. While some celebrate the practice for activating the viewer and connecting them to virtual others, perhaps discussing the show in real-time, critics point to cognitive costs and reduced productivity. A perhaps more scathing critique has been added to those multitasking while watching nature documentaries: you are already consuming nature through a scre...

Enrique Antonio Mejía. 2025. Productivity and plunder: Soybean frontier expansion and soil nutrient loss in the Argentine countryside. Doctoral Thesis in Economic History at Stockholm University. Department of Economic History and International Relations.

This compilation thesis investigates how Argentina’s rapid soybean expansion since the 1970s has fueled economic growth while causing significant environmental and social consequences, particularly soil nutrient loss. Existing research has overlooked critical gaps, including the under-representation of historical analyses connecting past agricultural expansion (primarily led by wheat) to current soybean dynamics, limited integ...

Sebastian Luckeneder. 2025. Spatial data approaches for assessing the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of mining activities. Doctoral thesis. Institute for Ecological Economics. WU Research.

The growing human population, economic expansion, urbanisation, and rising affluence have driven global resource consumption to unprecedented levels. Metals and minerals have experienced particularly rapid growth, and mining activities are projected to intensify due to higher demand in emerging economies, the global energy transition, and declining ore grades. While mining increasingly encroaches on vulnerable ecosystems, syst...

Andreas Plach, Lucie Bakels, Andreas Stohl. 2025. Reduction of residence time of air in the Arctic since the 1980s. ESS Open Archive. https://doi.org/10.22541/essoar.175318972.29624962/v1

The Arctic has seen dramatic changes in temperature, snow cover, and sea ice in recent decades. Here we use a simple metric, the Arctic residence time of air, that is, the time air spends uninterruptedly north of 70°N, to evaluate how these changes have affected the high-latitude atmospheric circulation in the last 40 years. We find that, on average, near-surface air resides between 7 (summer) and 12 (winter) days in the Arcti...

Mads Ejsing. 2025. New Materialism. Environmental Humanities Glossary. University of Copenhagen.

In the not-so-distant past, much of the humanities and social sciences treated the material world – the stuff of rocks, rivers, bones, and buildings – as passive scenery. Nature was the backdrop. Humans were the actors. We built, interpreted, imagined, and destroyed, while the world around us mostly reacted, inert and voiceless. But what if matter matters more than we thought? Emerging in the early 2000s, but drawing from a...

Mads Ejsing. 2025. Citizen Assemblies: Deliberative Mini-Publics for a Sustainable Future. A Climate for Sufficiency: 1.5-Degree Lifestyles Report.

To enable “immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors” of society (IPCC ), there is a need to change societal norms and behaviour. Unfortunately, just when structural changes are needed the most, trust in governments is historically low, and many citizens feel that the current systems do not work for them (OECD 2024). Therefore, there is also a high risk of political conflict and polarisation around climate pol...

Danielle S Spence, Maureen G Reed, James P Robson, Bianca Currie, Eureta Rosenberg, Marlis Merry, Jana Gengelbach. 2025. Intercultural networks deepen learning for transformative sustainability education: lessons from co-designing transdisciplinary international learning labs. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101567

In this paper, we emphasize the value of an intercultural network of researchers, students, and practitioners engaged in co-creating and delivering transdisciplinary sustainability learning opportunities. The network, the Trans disciplinary E ducation C ollaboration for T ransformations in S ustainability (TRANSECTS), is a north–south partnership with hub universities in Canada, Germany, and South Africa. Here, we in...

Mads Ejsing, Lars Tønder, Ingrid Helene Brandt Jensen, Janus Hansen. 2025. Do we have time for democracy? Climate action and the problem of time in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/20530196241279564

The urgency of climate change has brought democracy to a critical juncture. Existing democratic systems struggle to address the pressing time frames required for effective climate action. This article explores a fundamental shift in temporal orientation caused by climate change. Democracy’s linear and progressive image of time clashes with the expanding scales of temporality, encompassing both planetary and microscopic process...

Fernando Racimo, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Rebecca Leigh Rutt, Mads Ejsing. 2025. Degrowth and decolonisation in academia. Degrowth Journal. https://doi.org/10.36399/Degrowth.003.01.09

Like other societal institutions, academia today faces an existential crisis. Rising inequality and authoritarianism, coupled with climate breakdown and collapsing ecosystems, are threatening the conditions under which academic knowledge is produced and shared. At the same time, academics are coming to terms with their institutions’ role in contributing to these processes, particularly in the Global North. Many are recognising...