Open Call for Bachelor Thesis Supervision – 5 Projects available!

These are questions that are extremely pertinent in times 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 thesis projects under the supervision of Assistant Professor Mag. Dr. Christian Kerschner. The idea is a collective exploration of five different ideas, narratives or hypothesis by means of our browsable interface that allows country and sector level detection of carbon lock-ins and vulnerabilities in the case of fossil fuel restrictions. This interface was developed in our EU Project i-CONN (Global Economic Vulnerability: https://global-economic-vulnerability.onrender.com). With this tool we have now a large pool of data and combinations that need analysing with a specific research question in mind. Our dataset includes 163 sectors across 44 countries and five rest-of-world regions over the period of 1995-2022. For instance, one of the things we have already asked, is whether sectors that are necessary for decarbonisation (i.e. renewable energy and their supply chains) are also vulnerable when we want to phase out fossil fuels. Which they are and which of course is not good news. But there are still many other questions that we have not asked and investigated with our tool. This is where YOUR Thesis could come in!

If you are interested to join us in this effort, please reach out to christian.kerschner@wu.ac.at.

Please find some more details on background and results here.