Our starting research fields
At LCSES, we look at climate change, biodiversity, food, water, health, and energy as parts of one connected system—what we call a socio-environmental system. These systems are influenced by bigger forces like the economy and political decisions.
We work from a global perspective but stay grounded in real-world situations, especially in the Global South. Our team combines hands-on research, system thinking, and powerful synthesis tools—like meta-analysis and large-scale data studies—to better understand these connections and find practical solutions.
Our goal is to bring people and ideas together across different fields. We create a space for collaboration, creative thinking, and shared learning, so we can tackle today’s big environmental and social challenges together.
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Ecosystem functioning and biodiversity
Today’s predictive understanding on how climate and land use change affects biodiversity and ecosystems in their ability to provide the resources humanity relies on still is fragmented. We aim to develop models that comprehensively study ecosystem functioning and biodiversity feedbacks in a predictive manner and provide the methodological base to study biodiversity and ecosystem function trends and help mapping out the maneuvering space for societies with respect to resource use and the options on how to bend the curve of biodiversity loss.
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Global food security
Global food security encompasses ensuring the availability, safety, and sustainability of food in the face of accelerating environmental change, global resource constraints, and shifting socio-economic conditions. We aim to moves beyond increasing agricultural output by examining the broader systemic dimensions of food security—including food distribution, nutrition, and the socio-economic drivers of inequality.
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Global health
Global health addresses the growing challenges to human health stemming from the pressures of continuous climate change, environmental degradation, pollution, resource scarcity, and global interconnectedness. We will conduct quantitative research on the combined effects of these drivers on various facets determining human health, such as zoonotic diseases, nutrition insecurity, or climate-induced health risks.
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Climate change and extreme events
Considering that the Earth’s system is continuously transitioning into uncharted climatic conditions we need to advance our understanding of climate extremes and their impact on the environment and people. We aim to capture various facets of climate extremes such as temperature extremes, extreme precipitation events, wildfires, and focus on compound hazards.
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Global commons
Understanding how an economy functions based on renewable resources provided by (limited) ecosystem functioning given a (declining) biodiversity poses enormous challenges to research. The economics of global limited common pool resources seeks out for principles of an economy that is capable of sustainably managing limited resources. What is the consequence of a 60 to 100-year period that has led to an extreme unequal distribution of financial resource? How does unequal distribution of financial powers affect today governance, economy and freedom?