Yesterday, I talked about how secondary research on achieving society solved climate change is more critical than technical research on solving climate change. Today's journal paper talks about it in terms of the SDGs, aiming to achieve 169 targets for sustainable development in 17 areas by 2030. This aim is very ambitious, and we cannot solve it by doing things the usual way. Therefore, we need to transform the world all at once, rather than steadily make changes. I am also working on a case study for TIPPING+, a European Union research project, on how to transform a coal-dependent society in Indonesia.
We can distinguish trasformation between those that rely on structural change and those that seek change at the system level. Structural change is about changing society through technological innovation. For example, the decarbonisation technologies using composting and biogas that are being researched by another European Union project, LANDMARC. These standing carbon technologies will change the structure of society and cause transformation.
The other type of systemic transformation is when governments use subsidies, for example, to encourage social change across the board, not just in one technology. This level of change is not focused on any one technology, but on how society as a whole can organically change.
What both structural and systemic transformations have in common is that what they both focus on are outcomes. Moreover, this journal introduces a third approach - I say third, because it is a complementary support to the two approaches above. More specifically, this approach is about optimistically expecting the capacities of the groups and agents present in this system, and creating an environment that facilitates their transformation. In order to achieve this, we should embrace knowledge in a multidisciplinary way, consider more than one path to success, and think more seriously about what we call political influences. the third recommendation is particularly connected to what I wrote yesterday. I think it is an optimistic approach and as written it should be seen as complementary to the first two. I would say that if we want to achieve the SDGs by 2030, we have to try different things.
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