Safe and Social Living: the individual operating space in the context of Climate Change

In the light of continuing climate change and the wider effects of humanity in the Anthropocene, several efforts have been made to identify what can be considered sustainable for a planet with limited resources. Work on such ecological ceilings or thresholds in the Anthropocene includes the work on Planetary Boundaries and Tipping Elements, which define a safe operating space. The environmental sustainable development goals (SDGs) point out the ambition of the global community to stay within such limits. At the same time, many regions in the world are still underdeveloped and many still live in undesirable circumstances. Several frameworks for assessing progress towards goals of development exist, including the social SDGs and the context-dependent decent living standards, which define conditions for achieving basic human wellbeing.

The current understanding of such sustainable development for different projections of long-term socio-economic development scenarios in the context of climate change is limited. Especially, the extent to which achieving basic needs and development are in competition with staying within a safe operating space. Analysing the degree of this competition, in conjunction with the implications of excess resource use of the affluent, is a critical strand of research carrying ethical and distributional implications.

The successful applicant would unify these concepts into a coherent framework that defines a safe and social living space, with an ecological ceiling and social foundation. Then, the applicant should identify the possibilities for assessing the size and nature of the different dimensions in this framework by means of integrated assessment (using MESSAGEix-GLOBIOM developed by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis), both for upper (planetary boundaries / tipping points) and lower thresholds (decent living standards / social sustainable development goals).

Based on their interest, the applicant will identify a niche within this larger framework to focus on during the studentship, and further investigate the size and nature of the safe and social living space for this niche. For instance, redistribution effects of different interpretations of common but differentiated responsibilities could be explored, as well as implications of different mitigation and adaptation scenarios for biodiversity. In any case, the studentship will have a strong focus on climate change. Most likely this would be in the form of researching the effects of climate impacts and mitigating climate change on the challenge of staying within the safe and social living space, by exploring the dynamic nature of these upper and lower boundaries. The implications of climate impacts on the attainability of decent living can be explored, by incorporating climate impacts into an integrated assessment modelling framework. This means that the interactions between the natural environment and society (e.g. adaptive capacity) need to be explored in a way such that insight is obtained on the level of the individual. Alternatively, the effect of different model representations of climate change could be explored.