Research

The project explores the environmental history of forests in the area of the present-day national park Berchtesgaden, building on the historical sources kept in the local forest archive. It pursues two main thematic foci: The first explores how forest use (management, forest grazing, hunting) evolved in Berchtesgaden since the late 18th century. It further investigates the effects of these management changes on forest C dynamics. Important sources include visitation protocols, forest maps, forest cutting plans and overviews, and descriptions of servitute rights. Using methods such as C accounting and modelling, C stocks and fluxes in forest ecosystems will be reconstructed and analysed over long time periods and in a spatially explicit way. The second research focus inquires how historical interventions (or their cessation) affect present-day biodiversity in the forests of Berchtesgaden. To this end, the data compiled in the first thematic focus will be complemented by further spatially explicit data and recent datasets on biodiversity and spatially analysed. The topics will be further developed in an environmental history dissertation project and specified depending on source availability, and in case of need, additional sources will be consulted beyond those of the Forest Archive in Berchtesgaden.

Levels and structure of energy and resource demands are increasingly recognized as a key critical determinant of feasibility, timing, and costs of climate mitigation actions and their SDG synergies and tradeoffs. The higher the demand, the earlier, the more stringent, and the more costly climate mitigation will have to be. Conversely, lower demands increase the temporal flexibility of climate mitigation and reduce the stringency and costs of mitigation actions, thus also reducing the risks of SDG tradeoffs. Energy and resource demands themselves are intermediary variables, and it is the services and amenities that the use of energy and other resources provides. The efficiency of resource use and the efficiency of alternative service provision models thus moves into center stage of climate mitigation from a demand, or end-use perspective. Because of the high heterogeneity of consumers and the multitude of demand types (food, shelter, mobility, communication, etc.) the theoretical understanding and modeling of “demand” (outside aggregated simplistic formulation) remains limited and fragmented, as are resulting capabilities to propose and to assess demand-side policy interventions from the twin angle of climate mitigation as well as of promoting the SDGs. Overall project objectives 1. to improve the state-of-art of demand modeling in environmental and climate policy analysis, via methods and model intercomparisons and assisting the transfer of conceptual and methodological improvements across disciplines, sectors, and environmental domains. 2. to better inform policy via structured model experiments and simulations that assess potential impacts, barriers, as well as synergies and tradeoffs to other SDG objectives of demand-side policy interventions, particularly in novel fields and service provision models such as digitalization, sharing economy, or the integration of SDG and climate objectives in synergistic policy designs. 3. EDITS focuses on both the human and the technical resources by launching an expert network and a demand-side model comparison exercise.

There is increasing scientific evidence that current resource consumption patterns in industrialised societies are unsustainable, contributing to climate change, biodiversity loss and resource depletion (Richardson et al., 2023). In addition, the competition for resources is a primary driver of conflicts, posing significant security risks as demands intensify across industrialised and emerging economies (UNEP 2024; Zhou and Manberger 2024). Several studies highlight that perceptions of EU policies in resource-exporting countries are complex an mixed. While the EU is recognized as an important trading partner, there is significant criticism about various aspects of EU trade and climate policies that are seen as disadvantageous to their economic interests and development goals. Hence, as also confirmed by EU officials in the preparatory workshop, there is an urgent need for the EU to better understand and engage with perspectives from the Global South to improve its credibility and positive impact. Addressing these challenges is even more difficult due to the limited analysis to date on the quantitative effect of the EU’s decarbonisation and circular-economy strategies regarding (1) how possible pathways in the EU change raw material demands and related GHG emissions; (2) how these different changes in raw material demand alter supply chains, trade partners and traded materials; (3) and how these shifts influence social, economic and environmental conditions in resource-exporting countries, from the perspective of affected communities and government institutions; (4) the potential role of EU policies in fostering responsible partnerships and supporting just transitions in these countries. CIRCEUS aims to bridge this gap by, for the first time, providing quantitative evidence on how the EU’s decarbonisation and circular economy strategies impact its demand for raw materials and subsequently its imports. This evidence will generate new scientific insights and provide a basis for a more informed debate about transformation pathways in the EU that support equitable outcomes in resource-exporting countries including their local and indigenous communities affected by resource exploitation, recognizing the need to balance resource demands with social and environmental considerations, and to aim for cooperation rather than competition.