Sustainability Science

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Appropriate mobilization of science and technology is essential if society's developmental goals are to be reconciled with the planet's environmental limits over the long term. The Sustainability Science (SUST) Project seeks both to carry out research on fundamental questions arising from the interactions of complex human-environment systems, and to understand how such research can be targeted on key decisions and problems of practice. The project focuses on the dynamics of coupled human-environment systems; on the multiple, interacting perturbations and stressors that are so central to the sustainability challenge; and on place-based analysis embedded in the context of large-scale change. It seeks to engage researchers and practitioners in the joint crafting of a new field of sustainability science.

The project catalyzes and contributes to four interrelated lines of work:

• broadening the global change agenda to engage more directly the sustainability agenda;
• exploring the long-term trends in nature and society that set the stage on which particular environment-development interactions are played out;
• developing a place-based, integrated understanding of global change effects and vulnerabilities; and
• designing, supporting, and managing knowledge systems that can link knowledge to action for sustainability.

Sustainability science is not yet an autonomous field or discipline, but rather a vibrant arena that is bringing together scholarship and practice, global and local perspectives from north and south, and disciplines across the natural and social sciences, engineering, and medicine. Its scope of core questions, criteria for quality control, and membership are consequently in substantial flux, and may be expected to remain so for some time. Something different is surely "in the air" – something that is intellectually exciting, practically compelling, and might as well be called "sustainability science."

The project was carried out between 2000-2003 as a collaborative endeavor involving scholars from Harvard, Stanford, and Clark universities, the Stockholm Environment Institute, the American Meteorological Society, and the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change. It was based at the Kennedy School of Government under the leadership of Prof. William Clark (Director) and Nancy Dickson (Executive Director) with an Executive Committee consisting of: William Clark, Robert Corell, Nancy Dickson, Robert Frosch, Jill Jäger, Roger Kasperson, Robert Kates, Pamela Matson, James McCarthy, and B. L. Turner II.

A special issue on "Science and Technology for Sustainable Development" written by participants of the project summarizes the project findings and is featured in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (100(14): 8059-8091 (8 July 2003)).

The project’s support was from a core grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) (award BCS-0004236) with contributions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Global Programs.

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