Nine unusual and innovative ideas for a more sustainable future awarded

Environmental disasters increasingly threaten human settlements globally. Although awareness grows and action increases, a shift towards truly sustainable buildings and cities requires practical guidelines that translate policies and scientific theory into feasible and effective regenerative design solutions. Regenerative designs are ecologically functional as they create a positive impact on the well-being of humans and biological ecosystems. They generate ecosystem services, such as fresh water, food, habitat, temperature regulation and nutrient cycling, on which human and other life depends on. The aim of this Incubator is to create a pathway towards regenerative cities by uniting regenerative design strategies and linking them to one of the largest greenhouse gas emitter - the building construction industry. The team aims to combine ecological knowledge and computational science/technology, and develop a decision-support system that can quickly inform decision-makers in the building industry about innovative regenerative design strategies and the ecological benefits. Read more.

Digitization is vital in universities, enhancing communication and administration, and facilitating learning. However, data centers, crucial for digitization, consume vast amounts of energy, require water for cooling, and occupy land, with AI exacerbating this impact. This reliance on digital infrastructures and the commitment to maximize the utilization of digital resources under the Open Science framework juxtaposes UU’s efforts and the emphasis on sustainability, posing a challenging contradiction that requires further exploration. This Incubator aims to assemble an interdisciplinary team to tackle the challenge of operating a fully digitized university in ecologically sustainable manner, and to create awareness for the impact of our digital infrastructure. Read more

The global food system is struggling to provide enough and healthy food within planetary boundaries, while also struggling with issues of equity, fairness, food waste and lack of fair pricing for local producers. This Incubator will use a ‘Follow the Food’ approach to trace the workings of the global food systems: agricultural production, processing, trading, and consumption of foods. One of the recent tools to mitigate the impact of the global food system is Geographical Indications (GIs), an institutional (legal and political) tool promoted as preserving quality, heritage and fostering sustainability. GIs will be used as a lens to address the sustainability and equity challenges of global food systems, while keeping in mind that they may also be a case of sustainability-washing. Read more

Transformations towards sustainable food systems are necessary and will become more pressing in light of climate change, especially in parts of Africa like Ghana, Benin, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia and Zambia. In response, entrepreneurs, businesses and policymakers are developing food system innovations through the use of so-called Living Labs. But how prepared are intended users (especially households ) to adopt these food system innovations? That is the key challenge this Incubator team will seek to address. The aim is to build on the work of Healthy Food Africa, a consortium comprised of 10 food system labs in 10 cities and 6 countries in Eastern, Western, and Southern Africa. There the focus was more on what the innovations should be, and this Incubator aims to explore how to adopt them. Read more

Understanding the impact of the environment on people's health and wellbeing is crucial, especially with climate change and biodiversity loss. The challenge to ensure healthy and sustainable urban development has become more complex due to population growth, urban expansion and densification. Addressing these challenges involves integrating the three domains of health, climate adaptivity and biodiversity to explore how urban design choices and interventions aimed at creating sustainable living environments can impact people’s health and wellbeing. This Incubator builds on an existing partnership 'Building a healthy neighbourhood' and wants to include additional expertise and extend to also focus on the consequences of urban design choices on climate-adaptivity and biodiversity on residents’ health and wellbeing. Read more

The EU constitutional legal framework (Treaty provisions) contains a plethora of opposing aims and tasks that could either contribute to a fair, sustainable and inclusive society, or precisely the opposite. And the policies shaping the EU legal framework still depart from the growth paradigm, and are Eurocentric in their epistemology. This Incubator team seeks radical approaches how to bring about a paradigm shift in the constitutional, political and economic foundations of our society, and how to develop a new constitutional framework for a resilient and circular, but also democratic society based on the rule of law. Read more

Cities face diverse planetary crises, climate change, biodiversity loss and pollutants. Nature-based Solutions (NBS) can offer innovative redesign options that can integrate ecological, social, and technological factors to enhance urban resilience. However, implementing NBS in pre-built urban landscapes necessitates scrutiny of spatial, legal, and socio-cultural constraints. In dense urban settings with limited horizontal space and different usage and ownerships, sparing land for NBS might be challenging. The Incubator team aims to investigate where, how, when and what type of NBS can be implemented, and wants to explore the use of geo-data streams (street view images, 3D-surface models) to identify potential vertical and horizontal spaces. Read more

Young people bear the brunt of the climate crisis effects. Their perspectives are crucial to tackling the complexity. Traditional forms of research, policy and practices are well-explored but may overlook interest from the youth. Involving arts and culture in community-engaged data collection approaches can complement traditional research methods. This Incubator aims to develop an art- and culture-based data collection approach embedded in education that will result in a multimedia database with short videos, testimonies, pictures, art forms or literary pieces developed by young people. By involving youth not only as subjects but also as active participants, the team intends to recognizes their potential as agents of change in climate action. Read more

Global challenges cannot be seen in isolation; they cross-affect each other and what we are dealing with is a polycrisis. Real change, i.e. a move beyond extractivist, exploitative global governance, must be systemic change. This interconnected problem seems so enormous and the global socio-cultural, politico-economic organization so resilient, that systemic change sometimes feels out of reach. From that starting point, the Incubator team proposes to focus on three socio-economic, cultural-symbolic vectors that continue to drive and uphold the polycrisis: (racial) capitalism, patriarchy, and (neo)colonialism (CPC). The challenge they want to tackle is twofold: (a) how can these interlocking systems of socio-economic and cultural-symbolic power come into view as intersecting and as perpetuating the conditions for climate collapse? and (b) what obstacles hinder moving from understanding CPC to effecting (policy or behavioral) change beyond CPC? The incubator thereby reverses the question of sustainability: what makes CPC so ‘sustainable’ as a system and enables it to block real transformation? Read more