Values for a Sustainable Future: Transforming Values in the Context of Climate Change & Global Environmental Degradation

LUISS Open Access. Dec 2014 [Link]

Supervisors: Jean-Frédéric Morin (ULB) & Gianfranco Pellegrino (LUISS)

Abstract

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary project aimed to explore new pressing challenges posed by climate change and environmental degradation. Global environmental crisis tests existing institutions and technologies, political and socio-economic systems. Business-asusual approach underpinned by the idea of unlimited growth is no longer an option on a planet with finite resources. Humans are facing a multi-layered collective action problem, or rather a Gordian knot of problems, which emerges from unsustainable practices, behavior, and choices of billions of people and millions of businesses.

Global environmental crisis reflects the crisis of the Western system of values which let a few countries gain wealth and develop incredible technology over the past few centuries but also created serious social injustices and disrupted a harmonious co-existence of humans and nature. This project looks at the process of societal transformation that is required as a response to climate change and environmental degradation. This process is strongly influenced by political and economic forces and by technology. But the central component of the societal transformation is a shift in values that would allow the world to enter a more sustainable path to develop in the future, a transition towards sustainability