Sustainability Science: The Emerging Research Program

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed the emergence of an array of increasingly vibrant movements to harness science and technology (S&T) in the quest for a transition toward sustainability. These movements take as their point of departure a widely shared view that the challenge of sustainable development is the reconciliation of society's development goals with the planet's environmental limits over the long term. In seeking to help meet this sustainability challenge, the multiple movements to harness science and technology for sustainability focus on the dynamic interactions between nature and society, with equal attention to how social change shapes the environment and how environmental change shapes society. These movements seek to address the essential complexity of those interactions, recognizing that understanding the individual components of nature–society systems provides insufficient understanding about the behavior of the systems themselves. They are problem-driven, with the goal of creating and applying knowledge in support of decision making for sustainable development. Finally, they are grounded in the belief that for such knowledge to be truly useful it generally needs to be “coproduced” through close collaboration between scholars and practitioners. The research and applications program that has begun to emerge from these movements has been called “sustainability science” by the National Research Council. This Special Feature high-lights this emerging program and some of the new results it is beginning to produce.