Open Call for Bachelor's Thesis Supervision – 5 Projects Available!

These are questions that are extremely relevant in the context of climate change and geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. ISSET, the Institute for Spatial and Social-Ecological Transformations, at the Department of Socioeconomics at WU is offering five potential bachelor’s thesis projects under the supervision of Assistant Professor Mag. Dr. Christian Kerschner. The goal is a collective exploration of five different ideas, narratives, or hypotheses using our browsable interface, which enables the identification of carbon lock-ins and vulnerabilities at the country and sector levels in the event of fossil fuel restrictions. This interface was developed as part of our EU project i-CONN (Global Economic Vulnerability: https://global-economic-vulnerability.onrender.com). With this tool, we now have a large pool of data and combinations that need to be analyzed with a specific research question in mind. Our dataset includes 163 sectors across 44 countries and five “rest-of-world” regions over the period from 1995 to 2022. For example, one of the questions we’ve already explored is whether sectors essential for decarbonization (i.e., renewable energy and their supply chains) are also vulnerable when we aim to phase out fossil fuels. They are—and that, of course, is not good news. But there are still many other questions that we haven’t yet asked or investigated using our tool. This is where YOUR thesis could come in!

If you’re interested in joining us in this effort, please contact christian.kerschner@wu.ac.at.

Please find more details on the background and results here.