The Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) is an international research organization focusing on the issue of sustainable development. SEI has its headquarters in Stockholm with a network structure of permanent and associated staff worldwide and with centres the US, York (UK), Oxford (UK), Tallinn (Estonia), and Bangkok (Thailand).
SEI's US center is a research affiliate of Tufts University in Massachusetts and also has offices in Davis, California, and Seattle, Washington. It conducts a diverse programme focusing on the social, technological and institutional requirements for a transition to sustainability. Its funders include the United Nations, the World Bank, and numerous foundations and national governments such as the United States, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK.
In addition to providing policy-relevant analyses, the Center works to build capacity in developing countries for integrated sustainability planning through training and collaboration on projects. Its decision support tools are widely used: LEAP for energy planning and climate change mitigation, WEAP for water resources planning and PoleStar for evaluating sustainable development strategies.
Its activities are organized into three programs:
The Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy is a German research institution for sustainability research, focusing on impacts and practical application. It explores and develops models, strategies, and instruments to support sustainable development at local, national, and international levels. Research at the Wuppertal Institute focuses on ecology and its relation to economy and society. Special emphasis is put on analyzing and supporting technological and social innovations that decouple the prosperity of economic growth from the use of natural resources. The organization's activities focus on developing transformation processes aimed at shaping a climate-friendly and resource-efficient world.
Green building refers to both a structure and the application of processes that are environmentally responsible and resource-efficient throughout a building's life-cycle: from planning to design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation, and demolition. This requires close cooperation of the contractor, the architects, the engineers, and the client at all project stages. The Green Building practice expands and complements the classical building design concerns of economy, utility, durability, and comfort. Green building also refers to saving resources to the maximum extent, including energy saving, land saving, water saving, material saving, etc., during the whole life cycle of the building, protecting the environment and reducing pollution, providing people with healthy, comfortable and efficient use of space, and being in harmony with nature. Buildings that live in harmony; green building technology focuses on low consumption, high efficiency, economy, environmental protection, integration and optimization.’
Brynhildur Davíðsdóttir is a professor of environment and natural resources at the University of Iceland, the academic director of the Environment and Natural Resources graduate programme as well as the director of University of Iceland Arctic Initiative.
Environmental planning is the process of facilitating decision making to carry out land development with the consideration given to the natural environment, social, political, economic and governance factors and provides a holistic framework to achieve sustainable outcomes. A major goal of environmental planning is to create sustainable communities, which aim to conserve and protect undeveloped land.
A sustainable city, eco-city, or green city is a city designed with consideration for social, economic, environmental impact, and resilient habitat for existing populations, without compromising the ability of future generations to experience the same. The UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 defines sustainable cities as those that are dedicated to achieving green sustainability, social sustainability and economic sustainability. They are committed to doing so by enabling opportunities for all through a design focused on inclusivity as well as maintaining a sustainable economic growth. The focus will also includes minimizing required inputs of energy, water, and food, and drastically reducing waste, output of heat, air pollution – CO2, methane, and water pollution. Richard Register, a visual artist, first coined the term ecocity in his 1987 book Ecocity Berkeley: Building Cities for a Healthy Future, where he offers innovative city planning solutions that would work anywhere. Other leading figures who envisioned sustainable cities are architect Paul F Downton, who later founded the company Ecopolis Pty Ltd, as well as authors Timothy Beatley and Steffen Lehmann, who have written extensively on the subject. The field of industrial ecology is sometimes used in planning these cities.
The Global Scenario Group (GSG) was an international, interdisciplinary body convened in 1995 by the Tellus Institute and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) to develop scenarios for world development in the twenty-first century. Further development of the Great Transition scenarios has been carried on by the Great Transition Initiative (GTI).
The Tellus Institute is an American non-profit organization established in 1976 with the aim of bringing scientific rigor and systemic vision to critical environmental and social issues. Tellus has conducted thousands of projects throughout the world, and now focuses on the global future and how to shape it.
Paul Raskin is the founding president of the Tellus Institute, which has conducted over 3,500 research and policy projects throughout the world on environmental issues, resource planning, scenario analysis, and sustainable development. His research and writing has centered on propagating the Great Transition. Raskin has served as a lead author on a number of high-profile international reports, including the U.S. National Academy of Science's Board on Sustainability, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the United Nations Environment Programme's Global Environment Outlook, the Earth Charter, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report.
Stockholm Environment Institute, or SEI, is a non-profit, independent research and policy institute specialising in sustainable development and environmental issues, with seven affiliate offices around the world. SEI works on climate change, energy systems, water resources, air quality, land-use, sanitation, food security, and trade issues with the aim to shift policy and practice towards sustainability.
The Ministry of Climate and Enterprise is a ministry in the Government of Sweden responsible for policies related to the climate, the natural environment, energy, enterprise, innovation, radiation safety, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, outdoor life and circular economy.
Green infrastructure or blue-green infrastructure refers to a network that provides the “ingredients” for solving urban and climatic challenges by building with nature. The main components of this approach include stormwater management, climate adaptation, the reduction of heat stress, increasing biodiversity, food production, better air quality, sustainable energy production, clean water, and healthy soils, as well as more anthropocentric functions, such as increased quality of life through recreation and the provision of shade and shelter in and around towns and cities. Green infrastructure also serves to provide an ecological framework for social, economic, and environmental health of the surroundings. More recently scholars and activists have also called for green infrastructure that promotes social inclusion and equity rather than reinforcing pre-existing structures of unequal access to nature-based services.
The Global Water Partnership (GWP) is an international network created to foster an integrated approach to water resources management (IWRM) and provide practical advice for sustainably managing water resources. It operates as a network, open to all organisations, including government institutions, agencies of the United Nations, bi- and multi-lateral development banks, professional associations, research institutions, non-governmental organisations, and the private sector.
Sustainability is a social goal for people to co-exist on Earth over a long time. Definitions of this term are disputed and have varied with literature, context, and time. Sustainability usually has three dimensions : environmental, economic, and social. Many definitions emphasize the environmental dimension. This can include addressing key environmental problems, including climate change and biodiversity loss. The idea of sustainability can guide decisions at the global, national, and individual levels. A related concept is that of sustainable development, and the terms are often used to mean the same thing. UNESCO distinguishes the two like this: "Sustainability is often thought of as a long-term goal, while sustainable development refers to the many processes and pathways to achieve it."
WEAP is a model-building tool for water resource planning and policy analysis that is distributed at no charge to non-profit, academic, and governmental organizations in developing countries.
The United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) coordinates and integrates federal research on changes in the global environment and their implications for society. The program began as a presidential initiative in 1989 and was codified by Congress through the Global Change Research Act of 1990, which called for "a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change."
Mohan Munasinghe is a Sri Lankan physicist, engineer and economist with a focus on energy, water resources, sustainable development and climate change. He was the 2021 Blue Planet Prize Laureate, and Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice-President of the United States Al Gore. Munasinghe is the Founder Chairman of the Munasinghe Institute for Development. He has also served as an honorary senior advisor to the government of Sri Lanka since 1980.
Sustainable urbanism is both the study of cities and the practices to build them (urbanism), that focuses on promoting their long term viability by reducing consumption, waste and harmful impacts on people and place while enhancing the overall well-being of both people and place. Well-being includes the physical, ecological, economic, social, health and equity factors, among others, that comprise cities and their populations. In the context of contemporary urbanism, the term cities refers to several scales of human settlements from towns to cities, metropolises and mega-city regions that includes their peripheries / suburbs / exurbs. Sustainability is a key component to professional practice in urban planning and urban design along with its related disciplines landscape architecture, architecture, and civil and environmental engineering. Green urbanism and ecological urbanism are other common terms that are similar to sustainable urbanism, however they can be construed as focusing more on the natural environment and ecosystems and less on economic and social aspects. Also related to sustainable urbanism are the practices of land development called Sustainable development, which is the process of physically constructing sustainable buildings, as well as the practices of urban planning called smart growth or growth management, which denote the processes of planning, designing, and building urban settlements that are more sustainable than if they were not planned according to sustainability criteria and principles.
The Sustainable Mekong Research Network (SUMERNET) is a network of organizations committed to the sustainable development of the Greater Mekong Region. Launched in 2005, SUMERNET supports policy-relevant research and outreach activities to inform and engage policy-makers, planners and stakeholders. Within this context, it pursues an evolving agenda in response to questions and policy issues that arise in the region. Current research themes are climate-compatible development, regional economic integration, and ecosystem services and local development. The network works on a range of issues including natural ecosystems governance, floods and natural disasters, climate change and adaptation, and transboundary resource flows.
Energy modeling or energy system modeling is the process of building computer models of energy systems in order to analyze them. Such models often employ scenario analysis to investigate different assumptions about the technical and economic conditions at play. Outputs may include the system feasibility, greenhouse gas emissions, cumulative financial costs, natural resource use, and energy efficiency of the system under investigation. A wide range of techniques are employed, ranging from broadly economic to broadly engineering. Mathematical optimization is often used to determine the least-cost in some sense. Models can be international, regional, national, municipal, or stand-alone in scope. Governments maintain national energy models for energy policy development.
