The Formas call “Social and cultural perspectives on climate change and biodiversity” aims to increase knowledge about the link between climate change and biodiversity loss, from social and cultural perspective. This year, Focali member Torsten Krause is one if the researchers receiving funding – over 14 million SEK – for the project “Environmental Human Rights Defenders – Change Agents at the Crossroads of Climate change, Biodiversity and Cultural Conservation”. For four years, Torsten and his colleagues will explore the role of environmental human rights defenders when it comes to both cultural and biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation and adaptation. Additional Focali members will be involved in the project and Focali was mentioned in the application as a platform for dialogues and outreach.

Focali member Harry Fischer and his research colleagues received a project grant within development research of 4.5 million SEK from Swedish Research Council. The purpose of the project grant is to support research with particular relevance to the fight against poverty and for sustainable development in low income countries. In the mixed-methods project “Building synergies between biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and rural prosperity through community forest governance”, Fischer and his colleagues aim to provide insights to how community forest governance can lead to improvements in human well-being, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity.

Focali congratulate our members for these new research possibilities and look forward to collaborate and share the findings from their work ahead.

More about the two new projects

Torsten Krause, Lund University: “Environmental Human Rights Defenders – Change Agents at the Crossroads of Climate change, Biodiversity and Cultural Conservation”

“Environmental human rights defenders [EHRD] fight for political, cultural, social, economic and environmental rights alike, while often facing intimidation and violence for their work and activism. In this inter-disciplinary project, we seek to investigate to what extent EHRD serve as important agents of change at the crossroads of cultural and biodiversity conservation as well as climate change mitigation and adaptation. We first develop an overarching conceptual understanding of EHRD that can be applied to different social and regional contexts. We then focus our analysis on post-conflict Colombia, where EHRD assume a prominent yet precarious role as change agents. We analyse their goals, motivations and underlying discourses, and then investigate the practices they apply for protecting cultural heritage and promoting sustainable development. We further analyse the effects these strategies have, both successes and obstacles, including threats and severe implications for the vulnerability of EHRD. Across the steps of our analysis, we use an interdisciplinary mixed-methods approach drawing on political science, human geography, sustainability science and law. Our expected findings will provide multiple perspectives of the nexus of cultural heritage, biodiversity and climate change. We will contribute to better understanding and supporting different groups of EHRD, through informing international, Colombian and Swedish policy makers, civil society organizations and academics.”

Harry Fischer, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences: “Building synergies between biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and rural prosperity through community forest governance”

“Forest restoration is a key environmental policy objective of the present era. In the UN’s present “Decade of Restoration”, countries around the world have pledged to restore hundreds of millions of hectares of degraded forests — targeting rural areas of the global south where millions of rural and indigenous people live. While these efforts have potential to support a range of environmental priorities, it remains unclear to what extent large-scale restoration efforts are compatible with rural needs and other development objectives. Responding to growing calls for strengthening community rights and involvement, we ask: How, and under what conditions, can community forest governance lead to improvements in human well-being, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity from forest restoration? This mixed-methods project explores how national and state-level policy efforts in Nepal and India shape local influence in restoration planning, and we build a large dataset to test how different local governance conditions impact livelihoods, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity. In so doing, our work provides key advances to (a) better incorporate multi-scalar power and politics in theories of environmental governance, (b) generate new evidence of the relationship between carbon sequestration, biodiversity, and rural well-being, and (c) support policy innovations to advance toward a more just and sustainable global future. “

To see all the funded research projects, visit Formas and Swedish Research Council’s websites.