#4: Living within just boundaries (and not just safe boundaries), with Joyeeta Gupta

Who is responsible for the climate crisis? And how safe is it actually for everyone when we keep within established planetary boundaries?

For the first season of the DRIFT Transitions Podcast, we are republishing a number of English-language episodes on transition science and practice that we previously recorded for our Dutch-language channel.
 
Wouter Mulders and Neha Mungekar are very honoured to get to wrap up this season by discussing such questions with Joyeeta Gupta. She is a professor of Environment and Development in the Global South at the University of Amsterdam and a 2023 winner of the Spinoza Prize, which is like the Dutch Nobel Prize for science.

We talk about the novels of Perry Mason being an early inspiration, about how she managed to make climate law interesting for a diverse group of students and about the relation between gender, wealth distribution and climate action.

And Joyeeta wonders: how do we get to a storyline of more global equality? And why is it normal for engineers and pharmaceutical scientists to set standards and make recommendations, but not for climate scholars?

Handy links:
‘Prestigious Spinoza Prize for UvA professor Joyeeta Gupta’: https://www.uva.nl/en/content/news/news/2023/06/prestigious-spinoza-prize-for-uva-professor-joyeeta-gupta.html

‘Earth System Boundaries must include justice’: https://www.uva.nl/en/shared-content/faculteiten/en/faculteit-der-maatschappij-en-gedragswetenschappen/news/2023/03/how-to-include-earth-system-justice-within-earth-system-boundaries.html

The nine planetary boundaries: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries/the-nine-planetary-boundaries.html

For more transition know-how and how-to, please go to https://drift.eur.nl/ 
 
Thanks to: Audrey Wientjes for voice-over, Marius Kooij for editing, Igno Notermans for producing, Walvisnest for music, Lieven Heeremans for all sorts of advice and all our DRIFT colleagues for support and inspiration.

What is The DRIFT Transitions Podcast?

How is it that societies can plot the same course for years and years and then suddenly change at lightning speed? And why do sustainable innovations seem to pop up everywhere, while so few of them truly break through?

To understand this, perhaps a new perspective on fundamental change can help. If we want to grasp how our society can truly transform, we must look at it through the lens of transition thinking.

In this show, Wouter Mulders and a rotating cast of colleagues speak to a number of theoretical and practical experts about transition science. Because by understanding transitions toward sustainability and justice, we can also accelerate them—or at least, that’s what we hope.

The DRIFT Transitions Podcast is produced by DRIFT, the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions, part of Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands.