Climate & Cohesion. Notes after a winter of discontent

In autumn of 2022, the German Federal Intelligance Agency issued a warning that the forthcoming winter would bring civil unrest due to the perfect storm: the Russian war on Ukraine, rising energy prices, galloping inflation and a German society that has been suffering from an increasing lack of cohesion anyway.

At IRI THESys, we improvised a global observatory to monitor what was about to happen across the globe and how that would impact on necessary climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. Now, in spring and early summer 2023, it seems the winter of discontent passed more as a winter of minor dismay. How has this happened and what does this mean? Has everything returned to normal? Not quite: In this KOSMOS-Lesung, we want to discuss with the audience what has happened to climate protection across the globe and what we can learn from that.

Jörg Niewöhner is Professor for Urban Anthropology and Human-Enviroment Relations at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. For this lecture he was supported by Dr. Bettina König, Prof. Dagmar Haase, Dr. Desirée Hetzel, Hyunjin Park, Jelena Große-Bley, Jorge Vega, Dr. Màrk Somogyvàri, Miguel Angel La Rosa Salazar, Mina Karamesouti, Pauline Münch, Paz Araya, and Sascha Cornejo Puschner.

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