Understensho?jden is Stockholm's largest eco-village which was built in the early 1990s with the vision of enabling ecological living for people. However the ecovillage is no longer considered as environmentally friendly because of its relatively high energy consumption, and non-updated energy system. The purpose of this study is therefore to investigate how Understensho?jden should reduce their energy consumption and upgrade its energy system by using Blower-Door, IR-camera and Design Builder.

The current demanding business environment requires corporations to act fast in finding effective solutions to problems given the myriad of challenges they face (Dyllick & Hockerts, 2001). The challenges include the impact of climate change on business practices, natural resource consumption, chemical pollution, technological change etc. Moreover, the forces of globalization, heightened concerns about the deteriorating quality of the physical environment and increased stakeholder power are also increasingly having a real influence on business practices (Rainey, 2008). Since 1992, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) has encouraged the adoption of the concept of ecological efficiency (eco-efficiency) to support business efforts aimed at addressing some of these challenges. The aim of eco-efficiency is to reduce the amount of energy and materials used in production processes to achieve economic and environmental benefits (WBCSD, 2000).

Rapid urbanisation is putting strains on both the landscape and the city dwellers and the pressure on planning for sustainable and equitable cities is crucial. As many cities in Sub-Saharan Africa are expanding, city planning has trouble keeping up to meet the needs of the growing amount of urban dwellers. Many cities have also been planned with the cars in focus and the needs and comfort of the pedestrians have been overlooked. The capacity of institutions is limited due to centralized government and bureaucracy, as well as corruption. Planning is erratically implemented and it is difficult to know what will happen.

The purpose of this study has been to increase the awareness of what significance models of explanation have for intervention programmes, aimed at perpetrators of intimate partner violence, within the Swedish social services. The study is not gender neutral, it centres on male batterers in heterosexual relationships. The study is based on qualitative interviews with five people working within the topical field. I analyzed their statements using an ecological model of understanding violence. The main finding was that the people I interviewed had a multiple understanding when it came to comprehending the violence, but that when it came down to the actual intervention they targeted mainly on elements in the individual spectra, such as feelings of frustration.

The activities of beavers in forested landscapes affect both ecological and economical values. The creation of the dynamic wetland mosaic associated to beaver activities can even improve the quality of water and have been documented as an important landscape engineer affecting the environment for many species. The local office of Sveaskog in Skinnskatteberg is responsible for the management of large areas of the forests in the County of Västmanland. In this area one of several company?s goals are to create ten new wetlands in their own forests as a part of cooperation with the Swedish bird society and Swedish wetland association.

This master thesis summarizes contemporary theories on secularization processes in the Western world, and compares these with the example of Sweden, which by many scholars is considered to be the most secularized country in the Western world.I do this by dividing the most influential theorists in five different groups. In each group I explain how the theorists formulate and motivate their positions. These groups are:1) The secularization paradigm, where secularization always accompanies modernization. (Therorists: Steve Bruce and Peter Berger (in the 1960s)2) The paradigm basically accepted, but revised to depend on existential security, rather than modernisation as such. (Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart)3) Religion returned in the public sphere.

During a major part of modernity the concept of identity was something that in many ways was predetermined for the individual. People in general remained in the same social spheres as the generations before, shared common religions and beliefs and where more or less bound to a geographic area. Identity and lifestyle was something that was adapted quite unreflected from habit and tradition. Though, during the cultural modernisation process that took place in the twentieth century, previous shared patterns of interpretation vanished and became individual.  Finding references, constructing an identity and establishing a self became individual.

The purpose of this essay is to compare two investigationprojects /evaluationproject (BBICOHPeL) regarding theoretical anchoring and operationmethods. Important questions in our research has been: What from BBIC can be found in the OHPeL-project, what has become of the fundamentals in BBIC when they have been introduced into this new context, has the ecological development theory remained in the OHPeL-project, is it possible to say that the OHPeL-project is a further development, distortion or something completely different from BBIC. To find answers to our questions we have studied 17 protocols from evaluationmeetings in the OHPeL project. This led us to the results that BBIC in many ways are present in the project. There are also differences between the projects.

Industrialisation, modernisation and urbanisation are common words used to describe an evolving community. General patterns are often linked to the meaning of the above words but can these patterns be applied to individual parishes on the agricultural countryside?The purpose of this study is to seek moving patterns and how they change during the 19th century in the parish of Västra Eneby, municipal of Kinda, Östergötland. The main thesis is that the study will show an increasing intensity of translocations over the parish border towards the end of the 19th century.The study is based on material from Västra Eneby?s church archives to establish statistical data beginning with 1809 and with a sample rate of 10 years, ending with 1909.

Biodiversity can be described as the total variation of life forms, where diversity ranges from gene level up to the ecosystem level. The diversity can be calculated in a number of ways, and this study use one of these methods. In this study empirical food webs have been used and analyzed, where eleven characters are defined and used as parameters to calculate the Euclidean distances between food webs that describe the variation that may exist within classes of terrestrial, marine and freshwater habitats. The class who stood out and showed the greatest diversity at the ecosystem level was the marine food webs, which showed a high value of the average euclidean distance. The other networks were not as distinctive and the average of the euclidean distance in these classes was comparatively low..

Through this thesis, we want to discuss how the marginalization of people, several precedent political, city planning- and engineering decisions resulted in a catastrophic outcome after hurricane Katrina in New Orleans 2005. We also put forward a case study of the Make It Right Foundation, to demonstrate how the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward are involved in the urban development of their community. We would like to draw attention to the power of citizens and how they can influence the urban development of a community after a trauma. This study also focuses on the mission of The Make It Right Foundation: which is to rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward with firm concepts on sustainable development where all dimensions are accounted: ecological, social, cultural and economic. The empirical data was collected by a field study in New Orleans 2010-03-22 and semistructured interviews were made during the same days..

Syftet med denna undesökning var att ur ett ekologiskt perspektiv undersöka betydelsen av interna och externa resurser för integrationen för nyanlända flyktingar i Fagersta kommun, och om något upplevts särskilt viktigt för integrationen som bidragit till känsla av hopp och framtidstro. Två delstudier genomfördes. En kartläggning gjordes av lagar och regleringar som påverkar flyktingpolitiken samt en dokumentanalys av lokala policy- och styrdokument i Fagersta kommun. Åtta semistrukturerade ntervjuer genomfördes med fyra kvinnliga och fyra manliga flyktingar bosatta i Fagersta. Resultatet, som överensstämmer med tidigare forskning, visade att flyktingar behöver ges möjlighet att vara aktiva i sin egen anpassningsprocess.

The background to the work bases on the consumers view around Swedish and foreign meat products, and how the attitude around the meat products is pursued in the shops. The consumers request high meat quality and security . Many consumers value local produced and ecological meat products but the price is too high. We have done verbal interviews with consumers on three different shops, where we asked questions and had dialogues around Swedish meat products where the consumers have told us their arguments and opinions about Swedish and foreign meat. The result shows that the majority of consumers consider that it is important to know that meat is produce in Sweden.

The purpose of this study is to look at the line extensions of the Swedish dairy company Skånemejerier. We have chosen to focus on how trends in ecological products and Functional Food influence the line extensions. The competition in the food sector have made it harder for companies to be seen in the market area and the companies have to make their brands more visible. That is one of the reasons why companies work with line extensions. The study is based on a qualitative approach because we wanted to come closer to our subject in order to establish a greater understanding for the case itself.

Knowledge of ecological processes are a basis for the understanding of important environmental issues. Through qualitative interviews, 8 preschool class pupils have replied to questions concerning the concept nature, disintegration and environment. The aim of this survey was to examine what attitudes and knowledge children with different pedagogical background have about the nature and the environment.The result of this survey in whole demonstrates that all pupils have good and equivalent knowledge of the nature and the environment, independently of their different pedagogical backgrounds. A difference was however that children that have background from ?I Ur och Skur? (a Swedish outdoors preschool program) know the names of all small bugs that were in the survey.