13 Nov 2023
On 14 November, the new event series "FokusLMU - Fenster zur Wissenschaft" will be starting. At the first event, LMU researchers will discuss the question "Can the climate crisis still be averted?" from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Pandemic, recession and war: the world has been in permanent crisis mode for several years now, while society and politics are desperately searching for solutions to meet the many challenges of the present. What can research and teaching provide as stimuli for thinking about these current, socially relevant issues? This is the initial question of the new format FokusLMU - Fenster zur Wissenschaft.
Moderated by Professor Oliver Jahraus, LMU Vice President for Studies and Teaching, LMU academics will discuss socially relevant topics in an interdisciplinary format in the 2023/2024 academic year and provide an insight into their research.
The four-part series of events will kick off on 14 November in LMU's main auditorium with perhaps the most urgent question facing the world's population: Can the climate crisis still be stopped?
FokusLMU - Fenster zur Wissenschaft aims to show in an exemplary way how research at LMU helps to shape the world scientifically.Oliver Jahraus, LMU Vice President for Studies and Teaching
© LMU
"We can probably quickly reach a consensus on the fact that sustainability must become a guiding principle in the use of our resources. But how we can implement it in the individual areas of life is more difficult to answer. And even more fundamental is the question of what sustainability actually is. This is where science, and therefore the university, comes into play. The event on November 14 will present three specialist approaches and positions and bring them into discussion with each other and with the audience. This event is therefore a perfect prelude to LMU's new lecture series format.
FokusLMU - Fenster zur Wissenschaft aims to show the scientifically interested public in an exemplary way how research at LMU, from the broad spectrum of a truly comprehensiveuniversity with its different disciplinary perspectives, addresses and deals with the most important questions of the global community, creates new knowledge, opens up opportunities for action and helps to shape the world scientifically."
Prof. Dr. Oliver Jahraus is Vice President for Studies and Teaching at LMU. As patron of the FokusLMU event series, he is also the moderator of the panel discussions.
Eight years after the historic Paris Climate Conference and the entry into force of the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the global community is at a crossroads: is it still possible to limit the rise in the global average temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius and still achieve the targets set by the end of 2030?
Tuesday, 14 November 2023
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
in the Great Auditorium in the main building of the LMU and as livestream
No registration is required for the event in presence.
Register here for the livestream
The FokusLMU events are held in German. A recording with English subtitles will be published on YouTube one week after the event.
© LMU
"Effective climate protection requires a socio-ecological transformation of all areas of society. We therefore cannot assign the task to a single institution, a single person or a single sector, but must turn all the screws. National parliaments and the UN Climate Change Conference are just as important as, for example, central banks, competition authorities and banking supervision, which are perhaps not the first people to think of when it comes to climate protection. As a legal scholar, I am interested in the question of how institutions need to be structured in order to be able to act in the interests of climate protection, what resources, expertise or guarantees of independence they need, and how the decisions of different institutions influence each other."
Prof. Dr. Ann-Katrin Kaufhold holds the Chair of Constitutional and Administrative Law at LMU Munich and is spokesperson for the research group "The Institutional Architecture for a 1.5 °C World" at the Center for Advanced Studies at LMU Munich.
© Maggie-Janik
"The term 'sustainability' goes back to forestry in the 17th and 18th centuries, when several European countries suffered a shortage of timber. Only the sustainable cultivation of trees could, for example, fuel the (finite) silver ore mining in Saxony and secure the prosperity of future generations. Paradoxically, forestry, which was considered sustainable in the 18th century, turned out to be ecologically and socially unsustainable. Nevertheless, in the 20th century, the concept of sustainability was also applied to tree planting in an urban context, where it sometimes contributed to a diversification of the age structure and selection of species. Even if trees and plants receive little attention in everyday life, they have often played an important role in overcoming political crises as well as economic, climate and health crises."
Prof. Dr. Sonja Dümpelmann holds the Chair of Environmental Humanities at LMU Munich and is co-director of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.
© privat
"Epigenetics shows us how important it is to rethink how we achieve sustainability goals. It deals with changes in gene expression that are not caused by changes in the DNA sequence itself. Environmental influences, such as diet, toxins and stress, can cause epigenetic changes that then trigger diseases or affect our lives. But that's not all. The effects of environmental pollution taking place today can potentially affect the lives of our children and grandchildren. This broadens our understanding of sustainability by emphasizing the long-term consequences of our actions. But epigenetics can also be used to develop innovative solutions to overcome health or environmental challenges."
Prof. Dr. Katja Radon is Director of the Center for International Health at the LMU Munich Hospital, Academic Director of the European University Network for Global Health (EUGLOH) and a member of the Munich Climate School.