SR-CL

Abstract:

To reach the Paris agreement a deep decarbonisation is needed, calling for an integrated societal transformation that entails all aspect of daily lives in Austria. The Special Report (SR) condenses the available knowledge and in collaboration with stakeholders identifies potentials, options and limits to achieve structural conditions that enable, generalize, and sustain climate friendly living within Austria. It strives for a comprehensive, inclusive and integrative assessment with stakeholder involvement and a transparent process in line with IPCC and APCC standards.
It aims to do so by developing and pursuing an open process that facilitates and builds upon contributions by the full community of Austrian researchers, stakeholders and experts of the social, natural, and environmental sciences, as well as humanities, including all relevant fields of these, such as meteorology, ecology, sociology, political science, law, governance and management, economics, engineering, or geography and planning.
The special report provides a stocktaking of the scientific discussion on societal transformations, deals with the range of transformation options across five major fields of action and identifies cross-cutting issues like governance, innovation or finance. The literature on societal transformations provides various lenses and an extensive conceptual toolbox that explains and allows to design societal change processes. Approaches include, among others, transition management, transformation design, social ecological transformation, and power analysis.