What can a sustainable society be like?
What can we do today to approach a sustainable development?
How can we measure environmental impacts of products, services and other systems?
These are questions that fms work with. The Division of Environmental Strategies Research – fms is a part of the Department of Urban Planning and Environment, which in turn is a part of the School of Architecture and Built Environment. Fms’ aim is to develop solutions for, knowledge on and debate around strategic environmental problems. This is primarily done through multi-disciplinary research. The area of research is the interconnections between environmental issues, technological developments and societal change. With strategic environmental problems we mean environmental problems that are important and require long-term solutions. The problems may be globally important or important for Sweden, a sector, a company or an agency. Today fms is primarily active in three areas: Future Studies, processes of change and tools for Environmental Assessment and Management. The tools that we are using are employed in a number of areas such as infrastructure, buildings, information technologies, transportation, consumption, solid waste management and defense applications.
What can a sustainable society be like?
Within the area of future studies we base our work on systems analysis and use different types of scenario techniques such as backcasting and external scenarios. The concept of Sustainable development is important and often used as a starting point. The concept of sustainable development includes three dimensions: Ecological, Social and Economic Sustainability. We often operationalise the concept and define it in terms of ecological sustainability where economic and social impacts are assessed in integrated studies.
What can we do today to approach a sustainable development?
Within the area of processes of change we study behavior, lifestyles, policy instrument and strategies. In order to accomplish long-term solutions we need better knowledge in these areas. Policy instruments and strategies are bridges between the current situation and the future scenarios. In order to reach a sustainable development we need instruments, and the effect of these can be studied with different environmental systems analysis tools. It is of importance to find solutions in the short term which also are suitable in long-term solutions.
How can we measure environmental impacts of products, services and other systems?
Within the area of tools for environmental assessment and management we develop and use different environmental systems analytical tools such as life cycle assessment, strategic environmental assessment and life cycle costing. We also study how these different tools can be used for management at different levels.
History
The Environmental Strategies Research Group was formed in 1993. It was created as cooperation between the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) and the Department of Systems Ecology at the Stockholm University. Fms was started by the late Peter Steen who was a Research Director at FOI and an Adjunct Professor at Stockholm University. The idea behind the cooperation was to apply tools and methods from the area of systems analysis that were used at FOI, to the area of sustainable development. The group represented something new and interesting in environmental research and attracted external funding from a number of different sources and grew to approximately 20 persons when Karl-Henrik Dreborg become the head of fms in 2000. At this time the group consisted of researcher also from several departments at KTH and the Stockholm Environment Institute. In 2003 KTH started the Centre for Environmental Strategies Research providing an organizational platform for the group. In 2005 the Centre was reorganized to a Division making the group a more “normal” unit at KTH being involved in both research and education. This has been manifested during last year in the creation of the subject orientation Environmental Strategic Analysis. Today fms consist of researchers employed at KTH and associated researcher employed at other institutes.
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