The 23rd IAPS Conference closes with a prominent role of the People-Environment Research Group from UDC.

On June 27^th, the 23rd edition of the Conference of IAPS finished, leaving behind a positive balance among the  People-Environment group members. Two of the PhD researchers, Amelia Fraga and Isabel Lema,  presented their projects under the titles of “Environmental Education, Public participation and bottom-up processes” and “Psychosocial evaluation in organizational environments” respectively. Within the Social Psychology domain, the aim of these lines of research is to demonstrate two concepts. First, the importance and transformative functions of environmental education and secondly to analyze how certain working conditions, such as shift work, affect the workers’ quality of life.

Professors Ricardo García Mira and Adina Dumitru chaired several panels during the Conference and participated in the final presentation of results for the LOCAW Project, closed in December 2013, which is now at the stage of informing the public on the results. Furthermore, in line with the Group’s new projects, discussions focused on the use of research techniques and theoretical approaches on sustainability and to support transitions to socio-environmentally responsible lifestyles. Building future scenarios and agent-based modeling were presented as very effective tools to be applied in the study of local transitions, including both consumption and production models. The sessions highlighted the need for new research agendas as a means of responding the challenges of sustainability and climate change.

As an epilogue of the event, Professor García Mira gave the final lecture on the Role of Environmental Psychology in fostering Transitions to sustainable societies. He described the field as a resource to understand crucial aspects of global problems, as a methodology to explore interactions among people and environments they live and as a discipline which has uncovered problems and barriers to change within European societies. In addition, Prof.Garcia Mira highlighted the role that Environmental Psychology can play in designing policies to address the challenges for sustainable lifestyles to be upscaled, and claimed the need for transdisciplinary collaborations with actors from civil society in order to design democratic solutions to the problems sustainability is subjected in the XXI century.