Thank you to all of the conference participants for making Lisbon a great success. We had participants from 39 countries. Please check the links below for materials related to participation in the conference.
- Downloadable Delegates List
- John Ehrenfeld, Executive Director, ISIE. Plenary slides and talking points
- Rob Socolow, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University. Plenary slides
- Jan Rotmans, Scientific Director of DRIFT, Erasmus University. Plenary slides.
- Leith Sharp, Founding Director, Harvard Green Campus Initiative (now Office for Sustainability) at Harvard. Plenary slides
- Conference Abstracts
- Final Conference Program
If you did not have a chance to fill out a survey in Lisbon, please do so now. Your feedback is very important to the success of future ISIE conferences: Conference Participant Survey
Poster Competition Winners:
1st Place: (Tie)
Aweewan Mangmeechai
Life Cycle Water and Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Oil Shale Development in the United States
Engineering and Public Policy/Civil & Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University
Matthew Eckelman
Quantifying life cycle environmental impacts of the beneficial use of secondary industrial materials in Pennsylvania, USA
Program in Environmental Engineering, Center for Industrial Ecology, Yale University
3rd Place:
Arnim Scheidel
Diet, trade and land use. The social ecology of the food system. Case study olive oil
Institute of Social Ecology, IFF Vienna, University of Klagenfurt
Transitions toward Sustainability
The road toward sustainability poses many challenges with many areas of human needs to be dealt (e.g. food production and consumption, mobility, energy supply and use, communication, etc.). New ways of thinking, acting, and being are urgently needed.
There are many dimensions on which sustainability depends, including technical, socio-economic, cultural, spatial, environmental preservation, distribution of wealth, etc. Achieving sustainability therefore requires a multitude of changes identified by different disciplines as ‘system innovation’, ‘regime transformation’, ‘industrial transformation’, ‘technological transition’, or ‘socio-economic paradigm shift’. The term “transition” covers all of these and its direction and speed are determined by the collective innovation decisions of various actors involved.
The notion of transition has increasingly gained attention over the past years, in academic as well as in policy arenas. Policy makers are especially interested in transitions since incremental change is thought by many to be insufficient to lead toward sustainability. Transition is perceived as a policy objective that has great potential to guide solutions to current problems in various domains.
In a transition within a complex socio-technical-ecological system, both the technical as well as the social/cultural dimensions change drastically. This emphasis on the co-evolution of technical and societal change distinguishes transitions from incremental processes, which are primarily characterized by technical change (through successive generations of technologies) with relatively little alteration of the societal embedding of these technologies.
Conference Objectives
To stimulate transitions toward sustainability we need to build a strong knowledge base in this field. Industrial Ecology, as a framework for capturing both theoretical and practical knowledge, should contribute in many areas, including the following selected to shape this conference:
- Sustainable consumption
- Designing sustainable cities –
- the urban and the social metabolisms -
- Industrial Ecology tools for sustainability
- Visions on new IE-based paradigms towards sustainability
- Sustainable resource management
- Managing end-of-life products
- Industrial symbiosis
- Eco-design: products and services of the future
- Industrial Ecology in developing countries
- Environmentally Extended Input Output Analysis