Agency for resilience – Making people and energy systems fit for climate change and crises

ActRes investigates strategies to make people and energy systems fit for climate change and crisis through recommendations, education and training. Agency means the ability to take action or to choose what action to take. A sense of agency refers to the feeling of control over actions and their consequences. In climate change, disruptive events or other crises, agency of individual people and organizations as well as action options are the key to act on different scale, immediate and competent. There is a lack of agency on the different scales in the green transition.
Global climate crisis, shortage of resources and global political situation put a challenge on energy security and require resilience of people and energy systems. Disruptive events require stakeholder's immediate action in new, complex situations causing insecurity on how to act. Likely business as usual solutions will be the first choice possibly not contributive to green transition.
The lack of agency may lead to increased impacts of disruptive events on people and infrastructure. Stakeholders’ insecurity tends therefore forcing them to rely on business-as-usual solutions. Reenergizing after disruptive events needs to target resilience and sufficiency in the contexts' diversity, dynamics, human behavior and needs.

ActRes is part of Aalborg University's Energy for Sustainable Society (ESUS) Initiative.