Publications

Victor Galaz, David Collste. 2023. Finance for Resilience of People and Planet. Reflecting on 50 years after the Stockholm Conference in 1972. Resilience of people and ecosystems under climate stress. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Fifty years might not seem long in the history of planet Earth, but the last 50 years have had profound implications for the climate system, natural systems and all life on Earth. The year 2022 marks the 50th Anniversaries of the historic 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, and the beginning of multilateral collaboration on environmental and sustainability challenges. Financial pledges to support developin...

Johannah Bernstein, David Collste, Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Nathalie Spittler. 2023. SDGs for All: Strategic Scenarios. Earth4All System Dynamics Modelling of SDG Progress. The Foundation for European Progressive Studies and Earth4All.

The report examines SDG progress in the light of Earth4All’s five extraordinary turnarounds – poverty, inequality, empowerment, food and energy – and against the scenarios that lie at the core of the Earth4All model: Too Little Too Late, where societies maintain the types of economic policies that have been in place for decades, and the Giant Leap, a scenario where societies make ambitious decisions and investments today which...

Collste, D., Barbour, F., Callegari, B., Cornell, S.E., Gaffney, O., Spittler, N., Stoknes, P.E.. 2023. Modeling human wellbeing on a finite planet towards 2100 with Earth4All. Research Square. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-3228512/v1

How can wellbeing for all be reached while reducing risks of destabilizing the planet? This ambition underlies the 2030 Agenda but analyzing whether it is possible requires linking global socioeconomic developments with life-supporting Earth systems, incorporating feedback between them. Our new integrated systems model, Earth4All, enables exploration of plausible developments of human wellbeing and environmental pressures, 198...

Collste, David, Aguiar, Ana Paula D., Harmackova, Zuzana, V, Galafassi, Diego, Pereira, Laura M., Selomane, Odirilwe, van Der Leeuw, Sander. 2023. Participatory pathways to the Sustainable Development Goals: inviting divergent perspectives through a cross-scale systems approach. Environmental Research Communications. https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7620/ACCE25

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include social and ecological goals for humanity. Navigating towards reaching the goals requires the systematic inclusion of perspectives from a diversity of voices. Yet, the development of global sustainability pathways often lacks perspectives from the Global South. To help fill this gap, this paper introduces a participatory approach for visioning and exploring sustain...

Economy and Finance for a Just Future on a Thriving Planet

Collste, D., Cornell, S.E., Randers, J., Rockström, J. & Stoknes, P.E. 2021. Human well-being in the Anthropocene: Limits to growth. Global Sustainability 4 e30, 1–9.

Transformation of the world towards sustainability in line with the 2030 Agenda requires progress on multiple dimensions of human well-being. We track development of relevant indicators for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 1–7 against gross domestic product (GDP) per person in seven world regions and the world as a whole. Across the regions, we find uniform development patterns where SDGs 1–7 – and therefore main human nee...

Collste, D. (2021). Modeling Korpi and Palme’s ‘Paradox of Redistribution and Strategies of Equality.’ In R. Y. Cavana, B. C. Dangerfield, O. V. Pavlov, M. J. Radzicki, & I. D. Wheat (Eds.), Feedback Economics: Economic Modeling with System Dynamics (pp. 191–213). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67190-7

A new book entitled Feedback Economics: Economic Modeling with System Dynamics is the first comprehensive collection of the variety of ways system dynamics thinking can be applied to economic matters. The book enriches contemporary economic debate by shedding light on the feedback dynamics in economic systems that are often neglected, enabling the linking of economic and sustainability issues. Centre researcher David Collste...

Engström, R.E., Collste, D., Cornell, S.E., Johnson, F.X., Carlsen, H., Jaramillo, F., Finnveden, G., Destouni, G., Howells, M., Weitz, N., Palm, V. & Fuso-Nerini, F. 2021. Succeeding at home and abroad: accounting for the international spillovers of cities’ SDG actions. npj Urban Sustainability 1(1), 18.

Schneider, A., Hinton, J., Collste, D., González, T.S., Cortes-Calderon, S.V. and Aguiar, A.P.D., 2020. Can transnational corporations leverage systemic change towards a ‘sustainable’future?. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 4(4), pp.491-492.

To the Editor — We welcome the idea that transnational corporations (TNCs) can play a central role in the protection of the biosphere, recently contributed by Folke et al. 1 . It is certainly crucial to understand how TNCs affect the biosphere. While the authors provide a comprehensive overview of the impact of TNCs on the biosphere and propose some pathways through which TNCs might contribute to the stabilization of the E...

Aguiar, A.P., Collste, D., Harmáckova, Z.V., Pereira, L., Selomane, O. et. al. 2020. Co-designing global target-seeking scenarios: A cross-scale participatory process for capturing multiple perspectives on pathways to sustainability. Global Environmental Change, Volume 65, November 2020, 102198, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102198

The United Nations 2030 Agenda catalysed the development of global target-seeking sustainability-oriented scenarios representing alternative pathways to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Implementing the SDGs requires connected actions across local, national, regional, and global levels; thus, target-seeking scenarios need to reflect alternative options and tensions across those scales. We argue that the design o...