Headline: RIFS Blog December 2014

Berlin may not be the Netherlands, but there is definitely a fair amount of bicycling infrastructure throughout the city. And if you’re biking in Berlin you’re not alone on the road with only cars for company either. The debate about which cities are the best for biking aside, I enjoy biking, and this summer I biked home from work at least once a week. For me, this meant a journey of roughly 30 km and just under two hours depending on traffic, traffic lights, and how much energy I had at the end of the work day.

Part 1 of a blog series on climate protection and structural change through participation by Katleen de Flander and Ina Richter

In recent weeks, the issue of climate protection has been high on the national and international political agenda. At international level, participants at the UN Climate Conference in Lima last week laid the foundations for a global climate agreement that is due to be concluded next year in Paris.

As UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Envoy für Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All), Kandeh Yumkella has taken on the mammoth task of providing everybody on the planet with access to an environmentally friendly and secure energy supply.

When I give presentations about my work, I usually start with this question from the Dutch-American sociologist and economist Saskia Sassen:

“Are our global ecological conditions the results of urban density and agglomeration or are they the results of the specific types of urban systems that we have developed to handle transport, waste, disposal, building, heating and cooling, food provision, and the industrial processes by which we extract, grow, make, package, distribute, and dispose of the foods, services and materials that we use?” (from her essay:

Access to energy and freshwater are essential requirements for any society that wants to develop and prosper. These two factors depend on each other: energy is used to produce freshwater and water is needed to produce energy. This interdependency is better known as the 'water-energy nexus'.

Research into technologies for manipulating the planetary environment in order to forestall the effects of climate change is rapidly proceeding from small laboratory and desktop studies to the field. Concurrent with these developments, there have been calls for the establishment of governance mechanisms to ensure that the risks and concerns that this research presents are addressed appropriately, given the complex issues at stake.

It is often claimed that a higher ratio of natural gas to coal in our energy mix can mitigate current carbon dioxide emissions and serve as a ‘bridge’ to future renewable-based scenarios. This is because the carbon footprint of energy produced through the combustion of methane is about half that of energy produced from coal.