The Ukraine-Russia war and attendant risks to critical infrastructure, including sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines create new topics of discussion about sustainable futures and the risks associated with emerging and existing forms of critical energy infrastructure. Contributors to this panel are invited to explore methods, analyses and theories of infrastructure protection and attendant complex systems seen as both open and vulnerable, or that continually falter and are undermined according to their own logics and the logics of war.   

Critical Infrastructure is an assemblage of things that comprise human and non-human components. An electric grid, pipeline, natural gas terminal is part of a complex system composed of physical objects, the operating data and norms and practices for managing them. In other words, the new energy complex consists of both tangible things in a physical space (long-haul fiber optic lines, operation centers that control financial information flows, transmission lines, power plants, gas compressor stations, and so forth) and non-tangible things in a speculative space (promises of infrastructural investments by public and private sectors, the possibility of “nuclear Armageddon”). 

These themes draw attention to questions such as how does infrastructure engage actors in the politics of resource extraction, sustainable futures, but also war and territorial conflict? How does the customizability of infrastructure become key to negotiating security and sovereignty in existing resources spaces and the frontiers? How is infrastructure nested within other regimes such as markets and political aims, or global vulnerability surrounding the perceived abundance, scarcity, sabotage and political-environmental impact of non-renewable resources?  

Organizers

Arthur Mason,  Department of Social Anthropology, NTNU 
Vidar Hepsø, Department of Geoscience and Petroleum, NTNU 

Contact: Arthur Mason

Lynne Elizabeth Peterson 

Methylmercury in the food chain is a serious global public health concern and is largely mitigable. Coal combustion is responsible for most atmospheric mercury in the food chain. Fish consumption is the primary exposure to methylmercury in humans and the ecosystem, producing dangerous neurotoxic effects. Detrimental ongoing neurological deficits can result from fish eating during pregnancy: methylmercury crosses the blood-brain barrier and may potentially disrupt normal neurodevelopment.

The tension: global coal combustion is on the rise. Mitigation technologies to prevent atmospheric mercury from entering global circulation from coal combustion can reduce emissions by more than 90 %. Policies and regulations are in place, however, the recent decade demonstrated how fragile some of these policies are under various political regimes. This research seeks to understand the phenomenon of the global lack of constancy in response to mitigation potential via the latest technologies available. Instead, regulatory agencies have over-relied on Fish Consumption Advisories when real gains in preventing the risk of mercury in fish could have been attained.

Ontological and epistemological factors will be explored for their role in the parsing of terms that might help address this detrimental, yet solvable problem, through a justice lens. The expected outcome is that governance structures are relying too heavily upon ineffective and unjust FCAs, which in addition to not protecting human health, do nothing to protect the ecosystem.  

Date: 28 September
Time: 12.30 - 14.00

This session addresses the indivisible nature of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) framework and the related knowledge gap on how SDG targets interlink with each other. It examines how SDG targets interact in the context of a specific technology, solar photovoltaics (pv). This will be researched with interdisciplinary focus groups where a workshop (online "board game") on interlinkages in the case of solar pv will be held to identify trade-offs and synergies.

The selected SDG targets for this study (the selection of targets is performed prior to this session) are plotted against each other to discuss the interlinkages between the targets within the focus groups. Here the scale of Nilsson et al. (2016) will be used, where the interlinkages were scored as follows: -3 cancelling, -2 reinforcing, -1 enabling, 0 consistent, +1 enabling, +2 reinforcing and +3 indivisible.

During the session, the participants will be guided through an online board game where they can score the interlinkages and learn more about the SDG targets in the context of the technology. This will give them in depth information on how solar pv directly and indirectly relates to the SDGs (based on a literature review), but will also help them to identify how these direct and indirect linkages in turn relate (i.e. interlink) to other SDGs. 

Organizer

Nikki Luttikhuis, SINTEF Norway