School of Earth and Environment

Sustainability Research (SRI) PhD Projects

Identifying and learning from sustainable development pathways

Supervisors: Dr J Steinberger

Most industrialized countries have already attained unsustainable levels of resource use and ensuing emissions, and most developing countries are on track to join them through resource-intensive economic growth. However, some countries can be identified which have much lower resource use/emissions while maintaining relatively high living standards. Other countries seem to be on less resource intensive development trajectories.

There are many fundamental research questions in this area:

  • Where do the fundamental differences in global development trajectories stem from?
  • Is it possible, within the current constraints, for all nations to adopt the conditions of the few sustainable ones?
  • Or do the more sustainable countries benefit from unique circumstances, making sustainability more challenging to achieve for everyone else?

A thesis project within this topic would seek to accomplish some of the following goals:

  1. Establish a robust, multi-criteria framework for quantifying country trajectories, using internationally available data on environmental, social and economic parameters, over several decades.
  2. Employ a variety of statistical tools, including cluster analysis, to classify countries into different development trajectory groups.
  3. Determine criteria for sustainable development, and identify the countries which fulfill them.
  4. Analyze the potential causes for differing development trajectories, including biophysical information, such as resource endowment, and social, historical, political and economic structures.
  5. On the basis of the understanding gained, develop scenarios and projections of possible and plausible future development trajectories. Provide insights on the different measures to be taken by the different country groups if they are to achieve transitions to sustainability: these will be different for highly industrialized northern countries, fossil exporters, and so on.
  6. Place the findings in the context of ongoing global climate initiatives and policies.

Supporting documents:

If you would like to be considered for research in this area, you will need to provide a full research proposal.  This should be no longer than 6 pages, plus referencing.  You will need to present the proposal in sections to include an introduction, the aims of the project/research questions, full methodology, and referencing.  Referencing should be done in the style of a journal related to this research area.

Suggested references:

  • Steinberger, JK; Roberts, JT (2010): From constraint to sufficiency: the decoupling of energy and carbon from human needs, 1975-2005. Ecological Economics . 70 (2), 425-433.
  • Peters, G.P., Hertwich, E.G., 2008. CO2 embodied in international trade with implications for global climate policy. Environmental Science & Technology 42 (5), 1401–1407.
  • Dietz, T., Rosa, E.A., York, R., 2008. Environmentally efficient well-being: rethinking sustainability as the relationship between human well-being and environmental impacts. Human Ecology Review 16, 113–122.
  • Moran, D.D., Wackernagel, M., Kitzes, J.A., Goldfinger, S.H., Boutaud, A., 2008. Measuring sustainable development – nation by nation. Ecological Economics 64 (3), 470–474.
  • Unruh, G.C., Carrillo-Hermosilla, J., 2006. Globalizing carbon lock-in. Energy Policy 34 (10), 1185–1197.

Funding:

There is currently no funding allocated for this topic, but project proposals will be developed in early 2011.

Funding sources available to students include:

Note to candidate: You will need to demonstrate that you have/are being considered for 3 years of funding to include tuition fees and living costs.  Additionally, a bench fee may be charged, to cover exceptional consumables/fieldwork costs needed for successful completion of the project.  Please see the notes on ‘fees and scholarships’ in the main menu.

Entry requirements/necessary background:

The minimum entry requirement is 2.1 UK BSc (Hons), but students with masters degrees are preferred.

This project requires strong quantitative, computational and analytic skills.