Hungarian Science Festival – Lectures on current issues of sustainability will be held

The chairpersons of the event will be evolutionary biologist Eörs Szathmáry, chairman of the Sustainable Development Presidential Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA), and Zsolt Boda, director-general of the HUN-REN Social Science Research Center – read the statement of the organizer MTA sent to MTI.

According to the announcer, on Wednesday afternoon the audience can hear about the issues of sustainability and unsustainability of economic growth, as well as the psychological aspects of sustainable nutrition, as well as the obstacles to implementing environmentally conscious actions.

At the event, Miklós Antal, a member of the MTA-ELTE New Vision Research Group, will, among other things, look for the answer to why it is so important to increase the performance of the economy as measured by GDP, and why it is so rarely allowed. The presentation presents the deeper reasons why, regardless of the use of metrics, increasing GDP remains an important political and economic goal, which will most likely be unsustainable.

Csaba Kandrács, the vice president of the Hungarian National Bank (MNB), talks about what could be used instead of GDP to measure the performance of an economy and to describe the well-being of the population.

In her presentation, environmental psychologist Andrea Dúll shows, among other things, how psychology can contribute to the development of a nutritional culture that simultaneously serves the health of people and the well-being of the planet.

In the closing lecture, psychologist Attila Varga explores the phenomena of emotions experienced in relation to the ecological crisis – eco-anxiety, eco-pain, eco-guilt. It shows the most common psychological barriers that can hinder the realization of environmental actions and the formation of intentions.