 University of Barcelona, Institute of Environmental Science and Technology
 ICTA, the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology is a research institute at UAB, a University of approximately 3,000 professors and researchers and 50,000 students. ICTA aims to promote interdisciplinary research and training in environmental science and technology and counts with about 20 full time in-house senior researchers and several associated. ICTA researchers publish about 80 SCI articles per year and direct the PhD work of some 60 students (60% of whom are international) with about 10 new doctoral theses per year. External funding for research work is over 3 M € per year. Currently ICTA participates at 12 European FP6 and FP7 research projects. The work within the RESPONDER project will be carried out from the section on ecological economics www.eco2bcn.com. This group will offer expertise in two fields for RESPONDER, under the leadership of Joan Martinez-Alier. First, expertise in the new field of "socially sustainable economic degrowth" as recently evidenced with the publication of a special issue of the Journal of Cleaner Production edited by Schneider, Kallis and Martinez-Alier and recent articles in Development and Change and Ecological Economics. Furthermore, we are organizing at ICTA UAB in Barcelona the second international conference on Economic Degrowth for sustainability and equity in March 2010, with over 200 papers. Much of this output is directly relevant to RESPONDER. Civil society organizations are also involved. Second, at ICTA-UAB there is much research on resource extraction conflicts and waste disposal conflicts worldwide. The environmental justice movements and the "movements of the environmentalism of the poor" are main forces for sustainability, and their activities reinforce the Degrowth movements in industrialized countries. This is also a topic for knowledge brokerage within RESPONDER.
For further information, please visit http://icta.uab.cat/.
Persons involved
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Joan Martínez-Alier (PhD) is an internationally leading scholar in ecological economics and economic history. He has served as a president of the International Society for Ecological Economics and holds the Chair of Economic History at UAB since 1975. He has worked at the Universities of California (Davis), Oxford, Stanford, Yale, Campinas (Brazil) and FLASCO-Ecuador. Prof Martínez-Alier has published over 70 peer reviewed articles and over 40 monographs, books and edited volumes; his monographs on “ecological economics” and “environmentalism of the poor” are primers in environmental studies. He currently coordinates an FP7 project on Civil Society Engagement with Ecological Economics (www.ceecec.net/). He is also co-editor of the series Ecological Economics and Human Well-Being (Oxford University Press, Delhi). |
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François Schneider is an industrial ecologist and degrowth researcher working with the Group Research & Degrowth, www.degrowth.org. He worked on the development of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology at the INSA engineering school in Lyon and at the CML in Holland. Organising the first conference on allocation in LCA at Leiden, Holland, he finished his PhD on allocation problems in cascade systems in 1996. He initiated in Lyon in 1997 the first Toward Carfree Cities Conference, www.worldcarfree.net. He worked on material flow at the Institute for Industrial Ecology in Austria. He contributed to the start of SERI in Vienna, working on rebound effect, transport issues, sustainable consumption and regional flows. He worked at the INETI in Lisbon, www.ineti.pt, Portugal on product-service systems and material/water indicators in regions. Since 2001, he is active in the development of the degrowth concept and debate in France and Europe. Founding the research group Research and Degrowth in 2006, he initiated and organised the first and second scientific conferences on degrowth for Sustainability and Equity in Paris in 2008 and in Barcelona in 2010. Editor of special issues on degrowth in the journal of Cleaner Production. He recently co-authored a french/spanish book responding to 10 difficult questions on degrowth (Edition La Découverte or Viejo Topo) and wrote many articles on the subject. |
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Viviane Asara |
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