Environmental research takes the concept of sustainable development as its starting point. It concerns the issue of how to understand this concept, how to use it as a basis for evaluating private and public enterprises. Moreover, this concept could form a basis for different forms of development processes and what implications would follow for individuals if society should pursue the goal of sustainable development. Many of the projects have taken as their starting point the special challenges which the sustainability objective entails for the rural districts of Norway. For many years the group collaborated with Prosus (Centre for Development and the Environment) at the University of Oslo.
Transport and Environment is a scientific area of expertise. Considerable work has been carried out on both method development and concrete analyses of the energy and environmental characteristics of different means of transport. This area also concerns fundamental research on the relationship between mobility and sustainable development, and research on and development of alternative fuels. Important collaborative partners in this area are Norsk Hydro, Oslo Sporveier, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the University of Aalborg.
A third area of expertise is municipal environmental policy, where the focus has always been on the challenges associated with the objective of sustainable development and Local Agenda 21. A strategic institute program has been tied in with this area of research. In recent years climate policy and climate adaptation has been linked to this area of research. Several projects on indicator development have also been undertaken: Vestlandsforsking developed an indicator-based control system for sustainable development in the municipalities on commission from the Norwegian Association of Local and Regional Authorities, and Vestlandsforsking introduced ecological footprints as a tool of analysis in Norway. Important collaborative partners have been: the Ministry of the Environment, Norwegian Association of Local and Regional Authorities, ProSus (Program for Research and Documentation for a Sustainable Society) and CICERO (Center for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo).
On the basis of these three main areas, several subordinate areas of research have emerged in recent years: Analysis Tools and Indicators, Sustainable Tourism and Geotourism, Industrial Ecology, and Organic Farming and Local Foods.
