Megan Blomfield is a senior lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Her research shows that by considering what the world would look like if land and natural resources were shared and governed fairly, we can better understand the problem of climate change and some of the ethical challenges that it raises. Her book on this topic, Global Justice, Natural Resources, and Climate Change, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. More recently, she has been working on questions of land justice in a changing climate, including what a just transition might mean for those who work on the land.
University of Sheffield:
University of Twente:
Dominic Lenzi
Dominic Lenzi is an Assistant Professor at the Philosophy Department of the University of Twente. Prior to this, he was a Research Associate in the working group Scientific Assessments, Ethics, and Public Policy (SEP). His research explores themes in climate justice and geoengineering, where he analyses the value assumptions of climate economics and mitigation pathways, and the justice implications of carbon dioxide removal technologies. His research also explores themes in environmental ethics and environmental politics, such as the values of ‘nature’ and sustainability in the Anthropocene, and the political economy of natural resources.
Topics: Sustainability, Future Paths, Democracy
National Research Council (Argentina):
Francisco Garcia-Gibson
Francisco Garcia-Gibson is an assistant researcher at the National Research Council (CONICET), Argentina. He conducted research on the ethical challenges faced by climate activists, climate-minded political parties, and corporations that lobby for climate policy. His current project discusses the arguments that governments in developing countries use to justify authorizing new fossil fuel developments.
He was previously a research fellow at The London School of Economics, a Fulbright scholar at Princeton University, a DAAD scholar at the University of Frankfurt, and a doctoral visitor at University College London.
Western Sydney University:
Daniele Fulvi
Daniele Fulvi is a sessional Lecturer and Researcher at Western Sydney University, and he specializes in Modern and Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Environmental Ethics. His first monograph, titled Schelling, Freedom, and the Immanent Made Transcendent will be published by Routledge in 2023. His current research focuses on the ethical and social dimensions of technoscientific responses to climate change – with a specific focus on synthetic biology.
Consortium of Indo-Pacific Researchers:
Arushi Singh
Arushi Singh is a writer for the Consortium of Indo-Pacific Researchers and has a master’s in Geopolitics and International Relations. Her areas of interest include the geopolitics of West Asia, the geopolitical implications of great power competition in Africa, and emerging technologies.
University of Turin:
Erica Onnis
Erica Onnis is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Turin. She has been a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Cultures of Research” of the RWTH Aachen University (2021-2022) and a member of the Labont – Center for Ontology since 2015. Erica’s research interests lie in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science. In particular, her doctoral research concerned the nature of emergent phenomena, and the relation between the notion of emergence and those of reduction, novelty, complexity, and causation. Recently, she has been working on the ontology of food, food narratives, and their relationships with climate mitigation.
University of Oslo:
Alejandra Mancilla
Alejandra Mancilla is professor of philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo. She works on global justice, human rights, territorial rights, animal and environmental ethics. Currently, she leads the five-year project Dynamic Territory, aimed at rethinking territorial governance in times of climatic, geographic, and demographic change, and she is working on a mansuscript about Antarctica and political theory. She is the author of The Right of Necessity: Moral Cosmopolitanism and Global Poverty (Rowman & Littlefield 2016). Her work has been published in the Journal of Political Philosophy, Ethics and International Affairs, Grotiana, The Journal of Applied Philosophy, and Polar Record, among others.
Patrik Baard
Patrik Baard is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, Norway. His postdoctoral project focuses on rights of nature, relational values, and group rights, and is a part of Alejandra Mancilla’s ERC-funded project Dynamic Territories. Following his PhD in philosophy at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden (2010-2016), he conducted one postdoctoral fellowship at the Swedish Biodiversity Centre (2017-2019), and one at Malmö University (2020-2022). During the fellowship at Malmö University, he was a researcher in a project on justice in energy transition scenarios.
His research interests concern applied ethics and political philosophy, most predominantly in the areas of climate change and biodiversity.
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT):
Laura García Portela
Laura García-Portela is a postdoctoral researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and a LaCaixa Fellow. Previously, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Environmental Sciences and Humanities Institute (University of Fribourg) and a doctoral researcher at the interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Climate Change at the University of Graz. She has worked on green democracy, justice for loss and damage, principles of burden-sharing for climate justice, philosophy of attribution science, philosophy of climate law and emissions accounting.
Topics in the network: vulnerability and future paths
Université Laval (Québec, Canada):
Alexandre Gajevic Sayegh
Alexandre Gajevic Sayegh is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Université Laval. His current research focuses on the energy transition, climate justice, energy markets, a green economy, the ethics of carbon pricing, and methodology in political theory. He is particularly interested the relation between normative political theory and climate change. He is currently working on an extensive research project on a just energy transition in Canada. How can we take care of workers, households and best signal markets such as to accelerate the decarbonization of the Canadian economy? He was previously a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Political Science at McGill University (2018-2019). Before that, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and a Lecturer at the Department of Political Science at Yale University. At Yale, he lectured on ‘The Ethics of Climate Change’ and on ‘Markets and Morals’. He obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy at University College London in 2017
Queen's University Belfast:
John Barry
John Barry is a father, a recovering politician, Professor of Green Political Economy and Co-Director of the Centre for Sustainability, Equality and Climate Action at Queens University Belfast. He is also Co-Chair of the Belfast Climate Commission. What keeps him awake at night is the life opportunities and future wellbeing of his children in this age of the planetary crisis. His areas of academic research include post-growth and heterodox political economy; the politics, policy and political economy of climate breakdown and climate resilience; socio-technical analyses of low carbon just energy and sustainability transitions; and the overlap between conflict transformation and these sustainability transitions. His latest book is The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability: Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon-Constrained World (Oxford University Press), and is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled The Greatest Story Never Told: Ecocidal Economic Growth and our Planetary Emergency.
Robert Wade
Robert Wade is a PhD researcher in Queen’s University Belfast’s School of Natural and Built Environment. His research project is titled “The Political Economy of Landownership and Onshore Wind Energy” and is part of the wider, European MISTRAL project (https://mistral-itn.eu/).
Robert’s PhD research explores the role of landownership and landowners in onshore wind energy production in three European countries: Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands. His research combines a property rights lens with the insights of heterodox rent theory to show that wind resources are owned or ‘assetized’ by landowners. This research then traces out the implications of these wind rights configurations in the three case study contexts and suggests alternative wind resource ownership arrangements which can contribute to a fair and rapid energy transition.
University of Zurich:
Anna Wienhues
Anna Wienhues is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy and affiliated with the University Research Priority Programme Global Change and Biodiversity of the University of Zurich. She holds a PhD in political theory from the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on different themes in environmental ethics and political theory. On the one hand, that includes topics such as biocentric perspectives on moral standing (particularly problem cases such as microbes and insects) and concepts such as natural otherness and biodiversity. On the other hand, she works on themes of green political theory, particularly interspecies justice, its intersection with intra-human environmental justice and what this implies for sustainability and just conservation.
University of Gothenburg:
Fausto Corvino
Fausto Corvino is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Practical Philosophy at the University of Gothenburg, where he is a member of the Financial Ethics Research Group. Prior to this, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Moral Philosophy in the DIRPOLIS Institute (Law, Politics and Development) at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Pisa, Italy), where he also holds a Ph.D. in Politics, Human Rights and Sustainability. He is a member of Labont (Center for Ontology) at the University of Turin and the 3CSA – Center for Climate Change Studies and Sustainable Actions (Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Scuola Normale Superiore, IUSS Pavia). His main research interests lie in theories of justice, including global and intergenerational justice, philosophy of economics, and climate ethics. He is currently exploring the justice aspects of climate transition (and in particular of carbon pricing policies), the issues of fairness that carbon (and income) inequality poses for climate mitigation, and the reasons of self-interested reciprocity to care about future generations.
IASS (Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies )Potsdam:
Henrike Knappe
Henrike Knappe has been Scientific Project Leader of the Politicizing the Future project at the IASS since January 2017. Her research focuses on the political representation of future generations and the contexts and practices of democratic representation. Henrike studied political science at the University of Bremen, the University of Kraków and the Freie Universität Berlin. During a research internship at the University of Washington in Seattle she started researching the transnational networks of non-governmental organisations. Her doctoral thesis investigated practices of deliberation, participation and representation in transnational civil society networks. Henrike worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen before joining the IASS.
Topic: Democracy
Rosine Kelz
Rosine Kelz works at the IASS since 2018. As part of the research team “Politicizing the Future” she works on theories of temporality and futurity. In addition she engages with philosophical and political issues related to new biotechnologie, such as for example CRISPR or gene drives. She is particularly interested in the question how new biotechnologies play a role in changing conceptions of nature and technology. From 2016 to 2018 Rosine was a Mellon Fellow in the Bio-Humanities at the University of Illinois. Her first book,”The non-sovereign self, responsibility, and otherness: Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and Stanley Cavell on moral philosophy and political agency”, published in 2016, is about the role of relational notions of selfhood for theories of responsibility and political community. Rosine Kelz holds a D.Phil from the University of Oxford. She studied Sociology and Politics at the University of Essex.
Topic: Future Paths
Nina Döring
Nina Döring joined the Arctic Governance Group as Co-Research Group Leader in June 2020. Her research focuses on public participation, extractive resource management, anticipation, and change in the Arctic. She is also particularly interested in research ethics and Indigenous rights. She is co-leading the project on marine conservation in the Arctic and is working on a project on climate engineering in the Arctic. Following her studies in International Economics and Development at the University of Bayreuth and the University of Oxford, she completed a Dphil (PhD) at the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment. For her dissertation, she carried out research in west Greenland over a period of nine months in 2015/16.
Topics: Democracy, Sustainability
Grace Kageni Mbungu
Grace Mbungu joined the IASS in May 2016. Her research focuses on the social dynamics and dimensions of energy access and transitions towards sustainable energy for all, with a focus on the Global South. Grace holds a BA (Hons) in Political Science and Gender Studies as well as a master’s in Public Administration (MPA) with a focus on human rights and international development from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA. She holds a Ph.D. (Magna cum Laude) from the University of Stuttgart. Her dissertation focused on the: “Factors that Enable or Hinder Sustained Access to Sustainable and Effective Cooking Energy Services: The Case of the Informal Settlement of Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya”. Before joining the IASS, Grace worked as a junior researcher at DIALOGIK: Institute for Communication and Cooperation Research in Stuttgart, Germany, where she was part of a team tasked with identifying tools and instruments for better societal engagement in research and development. She is also actively involved with human rights and social justice issues and has volunteered at numerous organizations in Kenya, the USA, and Germany.
Topics: Sustainability and Future paths
Link: Read more
Silvia Weko
Silvia Weko joined the IASS in 2019 as a research associate for the project Investigating the Systemic Impacts of the Global Energy Transition (ISIGET). She holds a Master’s degree in Sociology from the Freie Universität Berlin, and a bachelor’s degree in International Studies from Juniata College. During her studies she worked for the Heinrich Böll Foundation on their global Energiewende project and was responsible for communicating the benefits of the energy transition to an international audience. As a freelance energy expert, she created the Energiewende Wiki for the Böll Foundation, performed quantitative research on transportation and emissions, and took part in expert dialogues on European energy and regional development.
Topic: Future Paths
Link: Read more
Universität Potsdam:
Fabian Schuppert
Fabian Schuppert is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Potsdam. His primary research interests are issues of social inequality, risk ethics and the normative dimension of climate transition. Fabian has been working on citizen assemblies, the legitimacy of transition processes, land rights in the context of climate change, the ethics of systemic risk, as well as the need for an alternative political economy. Together with Sabine Kuhlmann, Fabian is one of the academic board members for the University of Potsdam at the Einstein Center Climate Change and Public Policy of Human Settlements (ECCC).

Janina Walkenhorst
From 2013 to 2017, she studied political science and history at Technische Universität Dresden. She subsequently earned her master’s degree at the University of Potsdam with a focus in international climate and environmental policy. In addition to her studies, Janina Walkenhorst worked, among others, as a SHK at the University of Dresden, in an agency for sustainability consulting, and from 2019 to 2021 as a lecturer at the University of Potsdam. Thematically, she focuses on the contribution that sustainability initiatives make to society and politics internationally, from both a research and a practical perspective.
Janina Walkenorst works in the project ‘Climate Policy Governance from a City-Comparative Perspective: Identifying legitimate and successful climate policy processes for metropolitan areas’. It analyzes the influence of participatory governance on effective climate regimes in metropolitan areas.
Topics: Sustainability, Democracy
Rabea Scholz
From 2014 to 2017, I studied politics, administration, and economics at the University of Potsdam for my bachelor’s degree. I followed it up with my master’s degree in administrative sciences at the University of Potsdam from 2017 to 2019. In each case, my studies focused on political theory.
Since 2017 I have worked as a research associate in the German parliament. The substantive work in the Bundestag was decisive for me to deal more intensively with climate and energy research at the scientific level. The content of my work in the Bundestag focuses on the legal care of climate change. In particular, I am concerned in the Finance Committee and the sustainable financing of climate-friendly projects at the European and national levels.
In 2022 I started my Ph.D. studies at the University of Potsdam. The focus of my research project is on the consideration of energy justice theory. In addition, I am concerned with the implementation of energy justice in German political reality and the subjective perception of energy justice between the state and the local level.
Moreover, I’m interested in developing climate justice and implementing justice theories in political practice.
Jan Philipp Dapprich
Philipp Dapprich is a postdoc in political theory at the University of Potsdam. His research interests include distributive justice and economic planning. His work has investigated distribution in the face of emission caps and the prospect of using economic planning for reducing emissions. Some of that research is outline in the 2022 book Economic Planning in an Age of Climate Crisis, co-authored with Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell.
University of Bristol:
Alix Dietzel
Dr Dietzel specializes in climate justice and climate policy analysis. Her research focuses on both state (UNFCCC) and non-state actors. More recently, she’s been researching just transition in Bristol (UK), focusing on whether decision making is fair and inclusive, as well as considering what happens ‘on the ground’ once a city promises a just transition in their climate plans.
Topic: Future paths
Link: Read more
ARC (Arctic Centre for Sustainable Energy) Tromsø:
Øyvind Stokke
I am an associate professor in philosophy at the UiT The Arctic University of Norway. My research interests cover environmental philosophy, ecological Marxism, critical theory, critical indigenous studies and political philosophy. Within the Arctic Centre for Sustainable Energy (ARC) I am leading two projects: Transforming CO2 to capital by interdisciplinary CCU optimisation strategies (iCCU), the primary objective of which is to optimise industrially relevant technologies for CO2 Capture and Utilisation (CCU) by taking into account environmental, ethical, smart-technological and business-related aspects; and the pre-project The ARC Methodology, exploring whether a methodology based on synergy effects between different implementation contexts (be they ecosystems, other technologies, economic systems or social systems) can be used as parameter for assessing technological sustainability. My latest publications are ‘Environmental democracy and climate protest in the era of marketisation’ (Miljødemokrati og klimaprotest i markedsgjøringens tidsalder). (Norwegian Journal of Philosophy, 2-3, 2021), and ‘Thinking like an ocean: A climate ethic for the Arctic marine environment.’ (In: In search of Arctic Marine Sustainability: Arctic maritime businesses and resilience of the marine environment. Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2020).
Topic: Sustainability
Link: Read more
Arctic University of Norway – Tromsø (UiT):
Clare Heyward
I am a professor at the Philosophy department of the Arctic University of Norway, Tromso. Here I am heading the Environmental Philosophy Research Group. I have worked on analytic political philosophical approaches to climate justice for over 15 years. I am interested in all areas of climate justice, especially:
- cultural injustices caused by or associated with climate change
- intergenerational justice
- natural resource justice
- technological responses to climate change, for example, so-called “geoengineering” technologies.
Topic: Vulnerability
Kerstin Reibold
Kerstin Reibold studied philosophy, political science, and literature at Mannheim University and holds aPhD in Philosophy from the Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø. She has worked on questions about Indigenous land and self-determination rights in settler states such as Canada or the USA. Her thesis discussed how rights conflicts between Indigenous peoples and states might be resolved justly and which role colonial histories play in our understanding of these rights. Currently, she explores how indigenous, relational ontologies of land can provide alternative frameworks for conceptualizing territorial rights under climate change, but also, if unacknowledged, can lead to an intensification of enduring colonial injustices as climate change progresses.
Topic: Vulnerability
University of Southampton:
Chris Armstrong
Chris Armstrong is a professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Southampton. He works on global justice, climate justice, territorial rights, and natural resources. Some of his recent work has focused on the future of the ocean, and what just and sustainable oceanic governance would look like. But he is interested much more broadly in questions about just transitions, and in what kind of principles of fair burden-sharing and democratic inclusion we should adopt when we come to tackle major global problems.
Topic: Sustainability
The Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC):
Mareike Blum
Mareike Blum studied Governance and Public Policy in Passau and Environmental Governance in Freiburg. After her Master studies, she worked for 5 years at the Chair of Forest and Environmental Policy at the University of Freiburg, where she completed her PhD. In her doctoral thesis, she explored the discursive (de)legitimation of the global carbon offset markets based on ethnographic research during COP side events and interviews at the transnational and local level. Currently, she works in the Ariadne project and investigates how ‘mini publics’ can be involved in the knowledge production for the German Energy Transition. Thus, her research interests include the role of ideas, discourses and values in climate governance, the legitimacy and quality of democratic innovations, knowledge co-production, and deliberative/dialog-oriented learning processes.
Topics: Future Paths, Democracy
Universität Kiel:
Christian Baatz
Christian Baatz studied Environmental Science at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, and received his doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Greifswald in 2017. Subsequently, he led a postdoctoral project at Kiel University. Since 2020, he isJunior Professor for Climate Ethics, Sustainability and Global Justice in the Department of Philosophy, and leads a transdisciplinary group of junior researchers investigating what indicates a just financing of adaptation to climate change in the Global South. Central to Christian’s work are ethical questions in connection with climate change. His current research questions include: How are international funds for climate change adaptation distributed, what characterizes a just distribution, and how could the current distribution practice be improved? By which criteria should measures for so-called Carbon Dioxide Removal be evaluated? Who has a claim to compensation for climate change related damages and risks and how and in which form should compensation be provided? Another research theme is the justification and application of human rights norms.
Konrad Ott
Konrad Ott holds a MA in philosophy, history and German philology from the University of Frankfurt and a PhD in philosophy. In 1997 he began an endowed professorship at the University of Greifswald. Between 2000 and 2008 he served as an active member of the German Advisory Council on the Environment (SRU). During this time Ralf Döring and he developed a theoretical concept of ”strong sustainability,” which was gradually brought together with a research program focusing concretely on the protection of nature and biodiversity, climate change, water resources, agriculture and remediation.
His philosophical expertise is in the fields of discourse ethics, Environmental Ethics, theories of justice, sustainability, ethical aspects of climate change, nature conservation justifications, and the normative basis for environmental policy.
I have recently also become involved with the conceptual issues of “post-growth” society.
Lukas Tank
Lukas Tank is a postdoctoral researcher at Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. He is part of the ASMASYS Project aiming to develop an assessment framework for marine Carbon Dioxide Removal. He completed his PhD at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin with a thesis on the ethcis of carbon pricing. Much of his recent research deals with the ethics of climate change in the age of dangerous climate change. He sees his work on carbon budgets, the relevance of the non-identity problem for our current situation, and climate engineering as different aspects of the more general question: How are we to act now that dangerous climate change, at least in its early stages, is no longer a future possibility but a present certainty?
Freie Universität Berlin:
Christian Calliess
Prof. Dr. Christian CALLIESS is Professor for Public and European Law at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany and holder of an Ad Personam Jean-Monnet-Chair. From 2015 till 2018 he was on leave from academia in order to work as Legal Adviser to the European Political Strategy Center (EPSC), the In-House-Think-Tank of the President of the European Commission, and Head of its Institutional Team. From 2012-2014he was the legal representative of the German Parliament (Bundestag), appearing in the German Federal Constitutional Court and the Court of the EU (among others) in the ESM – as well as the OMT-Case.
Christian Calliess studied law at the Universities of Saarbrücken and Göttingen. After his First State Examination he received a Master in Advanced European Studies at the College of Europe in Bruges (Belgium). In 1995 he finished his Second State Examination in Berlin and obtained his PhD at the Europa-Institut of University of Saarbrücken with a book on the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity in the EU, published in second edition in 1999. He joined the Europa-Institut as an Assistentprofessor in 1995, where he finished his habilitation treatise with a book on constitutional and environmental law in 2000 that was awarded the price of the Gesellschaft für Umweltrecht.
Lund University
Eric Brandstedt
Eric Brandstedt is an associate professor in philosophy and senior lecturer in human rights studies at Lund University. His research interests include climate justice, intergenerational justice and methodological questions around normative political theory. He currently leads an interdisciplinary research project (funded by the Swedish Energy Agency) about a just transition to a low-carbon future. The project addresses the following questions: (1) What kinds of grievances does the transition to a low-carbon economy give rise to?; (2) What moral principles should be used to systematise and explain these grievances?; and (3) how can these grievances be dealt with in a fair way?
University College London
Fergus Green
I have spent almost 15 years working on climate change from multiple disciplinary perspectives, in numerous countries and in various professional capacities. I completed a PhD in Political Science (Political Theory) at the London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) in October 2019. I undertook postdoctoral research at Utrecht University and at the LSE before taking up my current position as a Lecturer in Political Theory & Public Policy in the Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy, University College London.
My research focuses on the normative analysis of public policy and on processes of political change, especially concerning climate change and decarbonisation. Much of my work is interdisciplinary, drawing on my training in political philosophy, law and political science (political economy). My work on decarbonisation is organised around three themes
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Green transformations and the good life
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Anti-fossil fuel politics and governance
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Just transitions for the “losers” from structural change
Working on climate change—perhaps the most complex challenge facing humanity—has led me to engage critically with fundamental questions about democratic institutions, contemporary capitalism, inequalities, innovation, loss, agency, adaptation, and well-being.
North-West University (South Africa)
Anél du Plessis
Prof. Dr. Anél du Plessis is Professor of Law and holds the South African Research Chair in Cities, Law and Environmental Sustainability, Faculty of Law, North-West University, South Africa. Her research focuses on normative and practical questions in sustainability law and governance with a focus on cities, climate change, federalism, democracy and the globalisation of urban governance. One of her keen research interests is the balancing of interests and just transitions necessary to improve on climate mitigation and adaptation in African cities.