How do new technologies affect our environment?
A new professorial chair dedicated to strategic environment analysis at KTH will result in better studies of how environmental issues interact with technology development and other changes in society. This research will be of an interdisciplinary nature, taking joint efforts between both engineers, social and natural scientists, and economists as its kick-off.
– The subject of strategic environment analysis wants to contribute to all kinds of solutions, more debate and a wider knowledge of strategic issues concerning our environment, says Göran Finnveden, newly appointed holder of the new Chair. Today´s society is facing a number of great challenges in both climate- and environment-related issues. These will affect a very large number of industrial categories as well as different sectors of our society, and that will require new and different solutions.
As long-term head of the KTH Div. of Strategic Environment Analysis, Professor Finnveden has devoted plenty of time to devising methodologies for estimating the environmental impact of various products and systems – buildings, energy supply systems, waste handling and transport systems.
This new professorship will bring about deeper insights in these knowledge areas concerning how technological and societal change does affect the environment, yet the opposite thing will also benefit from this, that is, how environment issues could, and should, affect technological and societal change. Among current issues of this type, the changes in our climate is the most obvious one.
– A common approval of the importance of stopping these climatic changes is gradually coming into being in society now, says Göran Finnveden. In order to succeed here, lots of decision-making processes must give these matters greater scope and importance, and this goes for politics as well as trade and business life. And to that end our decision-makers will need supporting facts – which is what we can supply them with.
Magnus Myrén