Research Projects

What kind of activities link climate mitigation to urban quality of life? How do we use and (re)shape public spaces for that? And how can urban mobility look like in order to increase climate mitigation and improve the mobility of local residents beyond the car?  The transdisciplinary project Climate-friendly Lokstedt – self-sustaining local transformation processes through real-world laboratories investigates those questions within the city district of Lokstedt in Hamburg. 

To what extent can the concept of field and field research, once applied from the natural sciences to social research, be made empirically and theoretically productive as a linking analytical tool between the natural and social sciences? How can the nature/culture dichotomy be overcome in the face of the climate and biodiversity crisis? The DFG-funded project "Experiencing Nature and Society. A Multi-sited Inquiry into Marine and Ethnographic Field Sciences" will investigate these questions during the next three years.

How do ideas about climate change affect policy-making in their function as the foundation for justificatory and advocacy frames in processes on climate change governance? How do ideas and discourse matter for policy in the context of multi-level systems? These and other questions are examined in the DFG funded project by PD Dr. Frank Wendler.

The Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies "Futures of Sustainability: Modernisation, Transformation, Control", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) deal with the question of how modern societies change when they are guided by different notions of sustainability.

The Cluster of Excellence "Climate, Climatic Change, and Society" (CLICCS) aims to understand climate changes, taking into account internal variability, extreme events, and unexpected side effects, addressing the natural and social spheres as well as their interactions. The overarching research question is: Which climate futures are possible and which are plausible?