During this seminar the Living lab concept and the potential to use the biosphere reserve as an arena to develop the Living lab concept in practice will be discussed. Welcome!
In 2015, the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the European Union's Green Deal (GD) transformed discussions on sustainable development. However, the proposed goals and targets often lack specificity for promoting innovation and sustainability, causing concerns among policy makers and key stakeholders. To tackle this problem Living Labs have been established all around the world.
The core of Living Labs is that they use user-centered approaches considering different key actors' opinions, making way for more collaborative and participatory methods. Hence, living labs challenges the research community to establish effective interaction models for co-creating knowledge, laying the foundation for innovative and impactful environmental policy and regulations.
Using Vindelälven-Juhttátahkka biosphere reserve as a specific example, we argue that Living Labs has the potential to play a vital role in achieving the ambitious goals of for example the SDGs and the Green Deal and contribute to the transition towards sustainable practices in natural resource management. However, this requires the capacity of different actors, not least among researchers, to deal with real world problems.
Camilla Sandström, Professor at the Department of Political Science at Umeå university and was 2023 awarded a UNESCO professorship for her research on biosphere reserves as ‘laboratories’ for the inclusive transformation of societies.
Ann-Kristine Vinka, Coordinator/operations manager for Vindelälven-Juhttátahkka biosphere reserve. Read more about the project: Vindelälven-Juhttátahkka biosphere reserve
Hjalmar Laudon, professor and chair of forest landscape biogeochemistry at SLU.