La semana pasada Xaquín Pérez-Sindín, Profesor en la Facultad de Economía de la Gdańsk University of Technology, Polonia, y miembro del Grupo de Investigación Persona Ambiente participó en las conferencia anual de la Asociación Internacional de Minería y Agua, International Mining and Water Association (IMWA) http://www.imwa2016.com/ y que este año llevaba por título Mining meets water: conflicts and solutions.

IMWA es una organización compuesta por más de 600 miembros cuyo interés se centra en las aguas de mina y problemas de drenaje de minas; donde tienen cabida multitud de disciplinas, en su mayoría científico naturales y de ingeniería.La organización está abriendo nuevas vías de conocimiento, incluyendo las relativas a las ciencias sociales.

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Emma López Bahut, Profesora del Departamento de Proyectos Arquitectónicos y Urbanismo de la Universidade da Coruña y miembro del Grupo de Investigación Persona Ambiente presenta
a presentar su libro “Jorge Oteiza y lo arquitectónico. de la estatua-masa al espacio urbano (1948-1960).

Será el miércoles 13 de julio a las 20h. en la Fundación Luis Seoane, dentro de un ciclo titulado: “Proxectos a contracorriente”.

Contamos con vuestra participación!

Se Ricardo García Mira e Adina Dumitru interviñeron en multitude de sesións avanzando resultados dos dous proxectos de investigación europeos GLAMURS e TRANSIT que desenvolve o Grupo na actualidade, outros investigadores e investigadoras do Grupo achegáronse a Lund tamén para presentar traballo dende a multitude de disciplinas que abrangue o mesmo.

The People Environment Research Gorup from the University of A Coruña, organizes, in the framework of the European project TRANSIT (http://www.transitsocialinnovation.eu) – the international seminar “Motivations, relations and transformations: the role of social learning in individual and collective agency for social innovation “.

 The seminar will be held at the Faculty of Educational Sciences (Graduate Hall, 1st floor) of the University of A Coruña (Campus of Elviña),  between the 8th and 9th June 2016 and will involve thirty researchers and activists, all experts in processes of transformative social innovation.

Download the programme here:TRANSIT_3IW_ACoruna2016_V7 (1)

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Supporting sustainable lifestyles in Galicia.

How can we extend lifestyles and initiatives that help to reduce the carbon footprint of our territory? How do we achieve examples of local sustainability can be upscaled to a regional and even supra-regional level? These are among the questions which the research project GLAMURS (acronym for Green Lifestyles, Alternative Models and Upscaling Regional Sustainability) tries to answer during its lifetime, between 2014 and 2017. The FP7 Project is coordinated by the People-Environment Research Group at the University of Coruña and other 10 European research centers and universities are involved, all under the strategy of the European Commission against Climate Change and towards Green Economy.

A participative workshop welcomed by a number of Regional institutions.

In this context last weekend the People- Environment Research Group together with the Provincial Government of Corunna, organized at the Mariñan Palace, in Bergondo (Corunna), the Second Back-casting Workshop. The event was opened by the Rector of the University of A Coruña, Mr. Julio Abalde Alonso, the Provincial Deputy D.Juan Penabad Muras, the Environment Councillor of A Coruña, Ms. María García Gómez, the Deputy and Spokesman of the Commission against the Climate Change in the Parliament of Spain, Mr. Ricardo García Mira and the Glamurs Project Coordinator, Ms. Adina Dumitru.

The workshop was attended by about thirty experts from all over Galicia linked to environmental organizations as ADEGA (Lugo) or Fragas do Mandeo (Betanzos), Responsible Consumption Groups as Zocamiñoca (A Coruña) or Carabuñas (Allariz), Environment and Rural Development Technicians, Centres and Schools of Environmental Education as Granxa Barreiros (Sarria), Collectives for Free Culture as Galiza Imaxinaria (Nigrán), researchers from the three Galician universities, staff at the Regional Government Institute for the study of the territory (Santiago de Compostela) and the Environment Delegation of Regional Government (Xunta de Galicia) in Ourense or Vespera de Nada, an association for the regional degrowth, among others.

Making an inventory of problems and regional solutions to achieve a sustainable region in the future.

The purpose of this second workshop was to deepen the future visions that began to emerge in December last year, this time looking to get to make an inventory of problems and solutions at the regional level and proposals to implement that could allow the desired future scenarios to become real in Galicia within 25 years.

Three different strategies towards sustainability: Eco efficiency, sufficiency and socially embedded growth.

Three were identified as the main strategies for Galicia to be sustainable and reduce their carbon footprint substantially in 2040: eco-efficiency, sufficiency and socially embedded growth. According to the first, Galicia would be more sustainable in 2040 through the greening of technologies and consumption (renewable sectors and km0 consumption), increased recycling and reuse of goods and materials. In the vision of sufficiency, our region would reduce its carbon footprint mainly by a decrease in the levels of aggregate consumption and demand. In the socially embedded growth, there would also be a reduction in the carbon footprint as a result of lower levels of demand and aggregate consumption also, but the quality of life of the population would depend on their small communities in which life would be organized daily and within which the resources will be distributed.

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If someone would ask you to imagine how Galicia will be in 2040, where would you start? Would it be easy for you to answer? If you think about it for a moment you may take into account some of the future projections with greater diffusion made by the INE (National Statistics Institute) or the IGE (Galician Statistics Institute) and some ideas like population loss, rural abandonment, aging or concentration in the Atlantic Axis (as you know this imaginary line which links the main cities in Galicia and that nowadays concentrates more than the 50% of the total Galician population) may come to your mind easily. Data show that the demographic crises is one of the biggest problems we will have to face to  as a society before we wake up in 2040 let the next generation take the wheel.

The  question that would be logical to wonder about next would be: and how we deal with this catastrophe foretold that is coming down the line? What are the available means we have to deal with this and who should be responsible to find solutions? Is it the Spanish central government, the regional government, civil society, the European Union?

Based on this rationale of prospective exploration the first  back-casting workshop took place on Saturday, 12^th of December at the Luis Seoane Foundation in Coruna as part of the European GLAMURS European Project, which addresses sustainable lifestyles escalation and how green economy models could be fostered across the European Union. The project involves 11 European research centers, under the coordination of the People-Environment Research Group from the University of Coruna.

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We only have this post available in Galician.

With this statement began his speech Ricardo García Mira, Professor of Social and Environmental Psychology at the University of A Coruña and President of IAPS (International Association for People-Environment Studies), at the round table on the role of environmental education in the management of urban waste and that was part of the course promoted by the UIMP(Menéndez Pelayo International University) developed in Ourense. So, last July 3, Ricardo García Mira, contributed with his knowledge and experience in the field. In his speech, he placed special emphasis on environmental education as key to promoting responsible ecological behavior, improvement and development of skills to train citizens capable of critical and of analyzing problems.

He also made special mention of two European projects of relevance: LOCAW, which aims to identify barriers and improving sustainable behavior in the workplace; and GLAMURS, which explores the conditions that influence the transition to lifestyles and sustainable transformation to a green economy.

TRANSIT (TRANsformative Social Innovation Theory) is developing a theory of transformative social innovation: a process through which social innovation contributes to transformative change. After the first phase of in-depth empirical work has now come to its end, TRANSIT shares its first materials. Over the past year, TRANSIT researchers have interacted with and studied 12 transnational networks – for each network they focused on the network level as well as on 2-3 local manifestations.

Photo by Pedro Larios Garcia (IHS)

Sorry, this entry is only available in Gallego and Español.

The afternoon of 3 March, the international workshop “Dialogues on Theoretical Development and Modeling towards Sustainability” ended at the UDC. This two-day workshop, brought together some thirty sustainability experts. From different disciplines among Social Sciences as Economy, Political Sciencies and Psychology but also from Computer Engineering and Industrial Ecology, the positions were brought together to keep on working in the European Research Project GLAMURS, coordinated by Prof. García Mira and which will finish in 2016.
During the 3rd of March session, the discussions focused on how to integrate the work developed by some of the 11 Universities involved within the project. More specifically, the work revolved around a survey design, one agent-based model and the econometric analysis, all of which will be outcomes of the Glamurs project and developed during the next steps of it. These three tools will also be crucial to understand the drivers of the sustainable lifestyles already present in the seven european regions Glamurs is focused.
Throughout the project a deeper knowledge will be achieved on some outstanding initiatives in the transition to sustainable lifestyles in Europe. These include some initiatives from Aberdeen (UK) working to reduce its oil dependence; Renewable-energy cooperatives in central Germany; Ecovillages in Timis (Romania), agroecological initiatives near Rotterdam and the region of Lazio (Italy).Likewise, the People-Environmet Research Group, from the UDC, will study some initiatives from Galicia working in sustainable food and clothing.

Aside from researchers working at the University of Corunna, the theoretical meeting sessions of this international workshop engaged expert researchers from the following Universities and Research Centers : University of Bath (UK), James Hutton Institute (Scotland, UK), University of Roma Tre (Italy), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway), and Universidad de La Laguna (Spain, Canary Islands) .

On March, the 2nd, took place the first of the group of training sessions the People Environment Research Group organizes under the title “”Dialogues on Theoretical Development and Modeling towards Sustainability”. This meeting is intended to help in the building of a consensus among the different streams of expertise the GLAMURS project uses as foreground, including Psichology, Economy, Political Sciences and Computer Engineering. This last discipline was the one the discussions centred, especifically on how the changes towards a more environmentally friendly lifestyles could happen and be included in a model for the future.

GLAMURS, the research project, started in January, 2014 and will finish in 2016. It is managed by the University of Corunna team, and Prof.Dr.Ricardo García Mira is its Coordinator. In it, 11 European Universities are involved and they count on financial support from the European Comission.

Apart from the researchers from the UDC, the theoretical meeting sessions of this international workshop engaged expert researchers from the following universities and Research Centers : University of Bath (UK), James Hutton Institute (Scotland, UK), University of Roma Tre (Italy), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway), and Universidad de La Laguna (Spain, Canary Islands) .