Models and elements: Commodifying Carbon for Climate Futures
29.10.2024
29 October, 12 - 2 pm, C.40.146, Climate Futures Talk with Adam Wickberg
In his talk, Adam Wickberg asks how the clashing environmental and social temporalities were made commensurable with each other through the concept of sustainable development that engendered certain climate futures. Through which conceptual tools, quantitative measurements, predictive models and projections were the planetary limits which supplied the framework for life on Earth made to appear possible to overcome with a certain form of economic development? The talk starts with a broad outlook over the political ecology of sustainable development in the global policy context in the early years of implementation, and then moves into the empirical case of the Swedish forestry which became a key asset in the country’s journey towards net zero emissions over the decades from the 1990’s onwards.
Adam Wickberg is a docent in History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is the co-director of the VR Excellence Centre for Anthropocene History and the deputy director of the KTH Environmental humanities lab. His work focuses on the critical intersection of digitalization and sustainability in its social, political and historical dimensions, as well as the Anthropocene as history. At KTH he works on the research project The Mediated Planet: Claiming data för environmental SDGs. Between 2021-2023 he was a visiting research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History of science in Berlin where he belonged to the research group Anthropocene Formations. He has published widely on media, science, technology and the environment and its history, politics and epistemologies in leading international journals and books. His research focuses on environmental data, digitalization and sustainability, and the history of the Anthropocene.