CONVERGE - Rethinking globalisation in the light of Contraction and CONVERGEnce
"How, given the current situation, do we manage and allocate, today, the Earth’s resources for the survival of a projected global population of 9 to 10 billion people in 2050 - and for their offspring indefinitely?"
So states the over-riding research question for a new and exciting project involving 9 organisations from the European Union old and new, from the developing world and from neighboring Iceland. Rethinking globalisation in the light of Contraction and CONVERGEnce is the full project title for this interdisciplinary research project, which is the first EU FP7 funded research to extend the concept of contraction and convergence beyond emissions trading.
Awarded close to 1.4 million Euros for 4 years research, CONVERGE aims to re-think globalisation by developing our understanding of convergence beyond emissions-trading across wider social, economic and ecological dimensions of sustainability. The principle of Contraction and Convergence (C&C) (Meyer, 2002) developed in the early 1990’s currently provides a framework for a smooth transition to a low level of greenhouse gas emissions from anthropogenic activity. As originally conceived C&C is based on the principle that every global citizen has the right to emit an equal per-capita share of ‘carbon’. It suggests that those levels of global emissions that are acceptable to the Earth be estimated, and that this be used to determine how much each country needs to cut back its emissions.
Taken out of the frame of greenhouse gas emissions, C&C unites a simple ethical principle of basic human equality with the need for sustainability and suggests the broad outlines of a programme to guide positive future change. CONVERGE proposes to extend the concept of C&C and its political applications to embrace the sustainability of trade, economics, society, the natural environment, energy, food, governance, wellbeing and consciousness – a new visionary concept for Sustainable Globalisation in the 21st century. To differentiate between meanings of C&C, this project’s extended version of C&C will be referred to as ‘convergence’.
CONVERGE has a significant role to play in achieving the strategic objective of the EU’s global partnership:
"to promote sustainable development actively worldwide and ensure that the European Union's internal and external policies are consistent with global sustainable development and its international commitments."
Key to the success of this study is the interdisciplinary approach and working with stakeholders from civil society, government and business. CONVERGE seeks to explore convergent sustainability relationships across different scales from local, national, global-regional to global.
Partners in the project include: The University of Bristol, The Schumacher Society and the Schumacher Centre from the UK; from Sweden comes the University of Lund and the Natural Step International; from Hungary GreenDependent and Szent Istvan University; from Tamil Nadu, India comes regional development agency SCAD and from Iceland, the University of Iceland.
The Natural Step is proud to participate in this exciting project and looks forward to keeping you informed of its progress over the coming years.
Visit the CONVERGE Project webpage to stay up to date with the latest project news: http://www.convergeproject.org/
For more information on The Natural Step’s involvement, contact: Josefin Nyström at The Natural Step International.
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