This report outlines how KTH Royal Institute of Technology could endeavor to align its business travel practices with its sustainability goal of reducing the climate impact of travel by 40% between 2015 and 2025. The core of the study involved participatory workshops with KTH's division of Real Estate Business and Financial Systems (AIE) to devise a CO2 budgeting and governance model tailored to the university's operations. This model aimed at establishing rules, practices, and strategies to mitigate challenges related to the reduction of CO2 emissions from flying, utilizing detailed flight data from 2019 as a basis for developing speculative CO2 budgets for 2025. The approach taken underscores the importance of granular data in understanding and managing travel emissions at the institutional level.

Our conclusions suggest a decentralized approach to managing carbon budgets at the divisional level, allowing for flexibility and autonomy in travel planning within predefined CO2 limits. It emphasizes the need for transparency in travel data within divisions to ensure equitable and effective participation in the carbon management process. The report calls for the development of systems to support data collection and integration into travel management processes, alongside a central oversight mechanism to ensure fair budget allocation and manage budget overruns. We propose an operational planning mechanism called "KTH Carbon Cycle" that -after further refinement - could enable KTH to meet its climate goals without significantly disrupting its operations or research activities. 

Drawing on collective experience from ten collaborative research projects focused on the Global South, we identify three major challenges that impede the translation of research on sustainability and resilience into better-informed choices by individuals and policy-makers that in turn can support transformation to a sustainable future. The three challenges comprise: (i) converting knowledge produced during research projects into successful knowledge application; (ii) scaling up knowledge in time when research projects are short-term and potential impacts are long-term; and (iii) scaling up knowledge across space, from local research sites to larger-scale or even global impact. Some potential pathways for funding agencies to overcome these challenges include providing targeted prolonged funding for dissemination and outreach, and facilitating collaboration and coordination across different sites, research teams, and partner organizations. By systematically documenting these challenges, we hope to pave the way for further innovations in the research cycle.

Coastal areas in many high-income countries face complex challenges of de-population, geographic conditions, and sensitive ecosystems. At the same time, they offer attractive leisure activities and nature for summer residents and visitors. This report summarizes experiences and observations from action-oriented collaboration in island communities of the Baltic Sea specifically focused on sustainable water and sanitation. A co-productive approach was employed where researchers and students collaborated with residents, municipal and regional authorities, conservation organisations, landowners, and private sector actors. Our findings indicate that co-productive approaches are beneficial and can complement formal structures, although we note several challenges to efficient collaboration. Most importantly, we identify an uneven temporal distribution of population that conflicts with the natural fluctuation of water availability as a key factor that affects, and in some cases blocks, positive outcomes. We propose the concept of schizotope (split landscape) to describe this seasonal variation. We argue that schizotopes pose serious challenges to co-production and sustainable development of islands in general, which need much more attention in regional policy and in research.

Kustområden i många höginkomstländer står inför komplexa utmaningar med avbefolkning, speciella geografiska förhållanden och känsliga ekosystem. Samtidigt erbjuder de attraktiva fritidsaktiviteter och naturupplevelser för sommargäster och besökare. Denna rapport sammanfattar erfarenheter och observationer från åtgärdsinriktat samarbete på öar i Östersjön med fokus på hållbara vatten- och sanitetslösningar. En samskapande metod användes där forskare och studenter samarbetade med boende, kommunala och regionala myndigheter, naturvårdsorganisationer, markägare och aktörer inom privat sektor. Våra resultat indikerar fördelar med samproducerande metoder som kompletterar formella strukturer, även om vi noterar flera utmaningar för effektivt samarbete. Framför allt identifierar vi en ojämn tidsmässig fördelning av befolkningstryck vilket kontrasterar med naturliga fluktuationer i vattentillgång som en nyckelfaktor som påverkar, och i vissa fall hindrar, positiva resultat. Vi föreslår begreppet "schizotop" (uppdelat landskap) för att beskriva denna säsongsmässiga variation. Vi argumenterar för att schizotoper utgör allvarliga utmaningar för samproduktion och hållbar utveckling av öar i allmänhet, vilket behöver mycket mer uppmärksamhet inom regional politik och forskning.

Science and technology studies and urban political ecology have made important contributions to the understanding of water provision in the Global South. In this article we develop insights from these fields with the aim to understand the blurring boundaries of urban water regimes and their power relations mediated by actors, institutions and technology. Furthermore, we explore how urban water regimes can form a critical interface which is a form of institutional–actor space where formal and informal water regimes encounter each other through conflict and cooperation.

Water and sewage (WS) systems are, like most grid based infrastructural systems, often centralised and hierarchical and the end user has almost no possibility to influence the technical standards, business models or system architecture. The preferred method for connecting new areas to the grid are underground water pipes and gravity flow for sewage. Thus, the WS system is “tightly coupled”. It is hard to change and conservative in its system culture, exhibiting a strong “momentum” or “path dependence”. In this article we investigate an unusual case in the development of WS-systems. As a rule, WS-systems, as most infrastructural systems, develop gradually through incremental innovations, and system owners/utilities traditionally build their systems “from the inside out”. In our case, we investigate a situation where the end users took the initiative to connect a residential area, Aspvik, part of the municipality of Värmdö, outside Stockholm, Sweden, to the municipal grid and thus expand the WS-system, not from the inside out, but from the outside in. Furthermore, we highlight another unusual feature: the role of a resident that acted as the “entrepreneur” in this process of WS-system expansion. The entrepreneur had unique trust building abilities in the local community, which the regime actor (the WS utility), could not match. Historically, inventor-entrepreneurs have been common, acting as “system builders” in the establishment phase of new infrastructural systems. However, entrepreneurs outside the regime are not common in the WS sector. Although atypical in mature WS systems in developed countries, these types of local initiatives or hybrid solutions are common in developing countries. In this article, we argue that there are lessons to be learnt from our case, when dealing with system expansion processes both inside and outside the Global North.

This article deals with ongoing attempts to recover heat and greywater at property level, based on an in-depth study of Stockholm, Sweden. We explore different socio-technical development paths from now up until 2050 using a novel combination of on-property technology case-studies, actor studies and system-level scenario evaluation, based on Artificial Neural Networks modelling. Our results show that the more conservative scenarios work in favour of large-scale actors while the more radical scenarios benefit the property owners. However, in the radical scenarios we identify disruptive effects on a system level due to disturbance on wastewater treatment plants, where incoming wastewater can be critically low for up to 120 days per year. At the same time, net energy savings are relatively modest (7.5% of heat demand) and economic gains for property owners small or uncertain. Current policies at EU and national level around energy-efficient buildings risk being counter-productive in cases when they push property owners to install wastewater heat recovery technology which, in places like Stockholm, can create suboptimal outcomes at the system level.

Decaying water infrastructure is a growing challenge in high-income countries while at the same time being under pressure from other socioeconomic and environmental issues. This paper analyses why addressing these challenges is so challenging, despite the critical role of water service for society. The paper is based on a study of the Swedish water sector and reveals how the utilities are influenced by several factors that constrain their agency. Most importantly, the utilities operate in a ‘societal shadowland’ where the public and politicians take their services for granted, lowering the sense of urgency and impeding their ability to take action.

Development research and interventions were for many years based on the assumption that richcountries had superior knowledge, solutions and expertise that could and should be transferred to"developing" countries. Strengthening capacity, institutions and scientists in low-income countries soonformed part of the agenda in order to increase their "absorptive capacity", create a more level ground forinternational research collaboration, and boost development. There is a growing need of placing theSouthern hemisphere in the forefront in global sustainability research. However, little attention has beengiven to the advantages of collaboration with low-income regions in order to produce new insights withglobal relevance. In the global South, there are experiments and innovations which might well inspirenew practises as well as alternative ways of understanding, and solving, sustainability challenges.Further, juxtaposition and distance may enable those in the north to see phenomena ‘at home’differently. In this paper we explore some distinct aspects of what can be gained from researchcollaboration with the global South.

Building on interviews with elderly people living in a low-income and auto-constructed settlement in Kampala, Uganda, this paper explores the notion of heterogenous infrastructure in its local spatial and temporal setting. Our aim is twofold. First, by intently listening to and weaving together situated narratives of how people over time have acquired infrastructural services, such as water, energy, waste, and sanitation, we reveal deeper insights of the socio-political, but also material structures and interactions at play between the State, the disenfranchised, and their intermediaries. Second, we start uncovering the so far largely unexplored potential of oral history as a method to meaningfully interpret the "infrastructural past" of postcolonial and Southern cities where most of ordinary people's experience was never put on record. Our findings point to the usefulness of oral history methods to widen the lens of who and what contributed to the production of fundamental resources for urban life-and its politics.

In this paper, we explore co-creative processes between researchers, art institutions and artists and new roles emerging for engineers in that process. The modern infrastructure ideal of universal, uniform, networked infrastructure has dominated the imagination of planners and engineers in the Global North and South for over a century. However, the dawn of the Anthropocene has triggered new concerns and challenges for critical infrastructures (water, electricity roads etc.) disrupting the modernist imagination. Somewhat unsurprisingly, these concerns have been translated into academic and policy discourses about the development of more resilient and socially inclusive critical infrastructures. 

In the ongoing project entitled Examining nature and society through urban infrastructure (NATURE) we develop an art exhibition in collaboration with the art institution Färgfabriken, in south of Stockholm. Sketches from the co-creative dialogues and interviews are used to illustrate how art can have a more central role the intellectual and public policy deliberations that shape new imaginaries of critical infrastructures.  Future development of infrastructure may once again become trapped into a (less resilient and less inclusive) modernist pathway. In other words, today’s infrastructure challenges pose a threat to critical infrastructures but also a window of opportunity for environmental humanities propose strong and novel ideas shaping future infrastructures. In this paper, we will explore how the arts can help draw attention to the importance of the role of previously unarticulated socio-natures and the role of the non-human in infrastructure imaginaries. The aim of the paper is also to initiate a discussion about how arts can become catalytic for translating key insights on critical infrastructures from the environmental humanities into more widely accessible and publicly deliberated.