Centre strengthens its research portfolio with Formas grants worth SEK 25 million

One of the larger projects funded is CAPS – Climate action through product sustainability in the food system, which aims to leverage the unrealized potential of food company sustainability commitments. They have received approximately 10 million SEK to

• enhance data synthesis and measurements for various environmental and social impacts of food commodities,
• provide guidance for transparent and credible sustainability reporting by companies,
  
• and analyze approaches for translating sustainability data into action, considering the role of company sustainability targets in fostering a just food system transformation.

“I believe that this project group brings something very special to the table – a mix of in-depth know-how in environmental impact accounting, years of experience diving into how to achieve big changes in society and major food companies, plus broad academic and non-academic networks, both in Sweden and worldwide,” says Centre researcher Malin Jonell who will lead the project CAPS.

Also Centre researcher Vanessa Masterson and her team have received a grant worth 10 million SEK. Their project is called “Powering change with justice: Weaving Indigenous perspectives to uncover impacts of the wind energy transition”.

The project aims to explore how renewable energy transitions in one place have unintended consequences in other places and at multiple scales. Specifically, the researchers want to examine spillover effects of wind energy projects on the territorial rights, sovereignty and ways of life of Indigenous Peoples and local communities and surface new transformative visions for just energy transitions. We focus on two cases: northern Sweden and Bahia, Brazil.

"We have gathered a very special transdisciplinary team to mobilize and bridge complementary knowledge systems including Indigenous rights and relationships to land, telecoupling approaches within social-ecological systems, and multi-level policy analysis. We are excited to have civil society and Indigenous partners, as well as collaborators from SwedBio, CEMFOR at Uppsala University, NILAS at Stockholm University, and INPE in Brazil on the team," says Vanessa Masterson.

The full list of funded projects announced in November 2023:

• Powering change with justice: Weaving Indigenous perspectives to uncover impacts of the wind energy transition – Vanessa Masterson (10 million SEK)
  
• CAPS - Climate Action through Product Sustainability in the Food System – Malin Jonell (10 million SEK)
  
• ReFRESH: Seeds of resilience for freshwater security led by Michele-Lee Moore (3 million SEK)
  
• Can systems dynamics models strengthen learning in a citizen assembly on climate and support transformative change? led by Tim Daw (2 million SEK)