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Sufficiency: A Good Life for All within Planetary Boundaries

Panel Discussion on Postgrowth Approaches to Sustainability

Blue Planet - Picture by Robert Clark
Blue Planet - Picture by Robert Clark

How is infinite growth possible on a finite planet? Are efforts to improve the efficiency of resource use within a green growth approach to sustainability really enough?

Time: Tue 2026-05-12 16.00 - 18.00

Location: Salongen

Language: English

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The Event

This panel discussion will focus on the growing role of sufficiency-based perspectives within a transition towards a more sustainable future, and how these perspectives have been applied in innovative ways. By looking at the role of sufficiency not only in everyday life but also in such areas as policy and industry, it will explore the potential of sufficiency for achieving a more equitable green transition than dominant, growth-based approaches.

In a context of steadily increasing global warming, biodiversity loss, economic inequality and geopolitical tension, recent years have seen a growing recognition that efficiency-seeking technological innovation is not enough. Defined by IPCC author Yamina Saheb “a set of measures and daily practices that avoid the demand for energy, materials, land, and water while delivering human wellbeing for all within planetary boundaries”, sufficiency-based thinking questions the logic of growth for growth’s sake, encouraging us instead to redefine dominant ideas of prosperity and the economy as a means towards an end. But how does this thinking translate into new ways of being, thinking and acting in everyday life? How can politics become an enabling force in this transition? What options are there for engineers and other professionals to reorient their practices in industrial contexts? And how do we harness the power of human imagination to take us where we want to go?

The Panellists

  • Pernilla Hagbert - Researcher, Division of Urban and Regional Planning, KTH 
  • Dirk Holemans - Author and Coordinator of the Belgian Think-Tank Oikos 
  • Oskar Lindgren - Researcher, Climate Change Leadership, Uppsala University
  • Anna Björklund - Professor, Division of Sustainability Assessment and Management, KTH
  • Lucía Pirón - Doctoral Researcher, Division of Sustainability Assessment and Management, KTH

NB 

Registration to this event is required! Click here  to secure a spot for the panel discussion and join us for a mingle afterwards. 

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