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What can the world can learn from a small town on Iceland?

Iceland

The small town, Akureyri, in northern Iceland has gone almost CO2-neutral. LUCSUS vising researcher Henner Busch, and LUMES Alumni (Batch 19) Rakel Kristjandottir, went there to find out how they did it and what we can learn from them.

Nowadays cities are quite unsustainable places. They consume a lot of the world’s resources and account for more than half of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases, contributing substantially to the ongoing climate crisis.

But cities are also the places where a lot of our sustainability problems can be addressed effectively. A small town in northern Iceland has gone a long way to show us how.

I have been to Akureyri a couple of times myself, but to gather some more information my colleague Rakel Kristjansdottir went up there and brought home some truly inspiring field notes for us to study.

Read the popular science article on ScienceNordic here

Read the publication "Towards a Neutral North—The Urban Low Carbon Transitions of Akureyri, Iceland"  in Sustianability 

The article is based on a LUMES Master Thesis by Rakel Kristjandottir, Towards a neutral North : identifying factors that drive a municipality to actively propel a low carbon transition : a case study of Akureyri, Iceland 

Hennes Busch

Henner Busch
Postdoctoral fellow at Department of Human Geography and Visiting researcher at LUCSUS.

E-mail: henner [dot] busch [at] keg [dot] lu [dot] se (henner[dot]busch[at]keg[dot]lu[dot]se)