The Laboratory for the Analysis of Social-Ecological Systems in a Globalised world (LASEG) is a research group at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB). We aim to better understand how local and indigenous knowledge can contribute to environmental sustainability, and how to better reconcile biodiversity conservation and the provision of ecosystem services with human wellbeing.
We conduct our research in a large range of societies (i.e., indigenous peoples, urban and rural communities) and we pay attention to temporal scales (i.e. contemporary and archival work). We employ a variety of quantitative and qualitative research techniques from the social and natural sciences, and the combination of different types of data and disciplinary backgrounds enriches our work and makes it potentially more relevant to multiple disciplinary audiences.
Researching on how Indigenous Peoples and local communities’ knowledge is affected by environmental change and how such knowledge can contribute to understand environmental change impacts.
Researching environmental governance processes in the areas of climate change and the conservation of biodiversity, from international to national and local levels.
Investigating transformative pathways toward sustainability founded upon the concept of ecosystem services and nature-based solutions.
NICHES will demonstrate the capacity of nature-based solutions to mitigate stormwater runoff, flooding and sewer overflow events and highlight transformation pathways to deliver this potential. The project will simultaneously enhance social-ecological qualities and ecosystem services at source and in receiving water bodies.
CONDJUST is an ambitious five year project that seeks to contribute to a new field of enquiry: Conservation Data Justice. It tackles novel topics in Data Justice and apply them to the remote sensing, models and data used to create global maps of conservation priorities; it explores the epistemic communities producing these maps, their policy reach and the governance of this research in the conservation community.
Bringing indigenous and local knowledge to climate change policy.