Our challenge 'themes'
The Institute for Sustainable Futures co-ordinates its work around six challenges. These challenges have been chosen to both highlight our existing research expertise in sustainability, and to help frame our existing research strengths around the applied sustainability challenges that our society and environment face.
Each challenge is inherently interdisciplinary, being approached at Keele already from several different perspectives, hence providing areas around which new interdisciplinary teams may coalesce to create further collaborative projects. There is also inevitably overlap between each theme and intentional overlap between the University’s other research institutes. Our research sits within complex systems without boundaries, hence these overlaps are a natural consequence of the complexity that these challenges pose.
These themes are mapped against the 17 United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, ratified in 2015, which highlight the breadth of the range of challenges that we face in working collectively towards a more sustainable future. These ‘Global Goals’ have increasing traction with national and international policy makers as well as funders, and other major stakeholders. Aligning our research to these Global Goals highlights our contributions to this major international agenda as well as ensuring that we maintain focus on and align ourselves to the areas that have been recognised as making a positive difference to a more sustainable future.
Our partners
