International Journal of Technology Management and Sustainable Development

The nett decade has witnessed the emergence of an array of increasingly spirited movements to harness wisdom and engineering (S&T) in the quest for a transition toward sustainability. These movements take as their point of departure a widely sh bed view that the dispute of sustainable phylogenesis is the reconciliation of communitys development stopping points with the planets environmental limits over the tenacious status.In testing to help meet this sustainability challenge, the multiple movements to harness cognizance and technology for sustainability focus on the dynamic interactions in the midst of nature and conjunction, with adequate 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 behaviour of the systems th emselves.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 much(prenominal) knowledge to be truly useable it generally ask to be coproduced through close collaboration between scholars and practitioners. The look for and applications program that has begun to emerge from these movements has been called sustainability science by the National enquiry Council.This finical Feature high-lights this emerge program and some of the new results it is starting line to produce. The need for sustainable development initiatives to mobilize appropriate science and technology has long been recognized. Early research on sustainable yield management of renewable resources provided the foundation for the International Union for the Conservation of Natures seminal universe of discourse Conservation Strategy, published in 1980.The case for making appropriate rese arch and development (R&D) an integral component of sustainable development strategies was broadened by a bout of international scientific organizations during the mid-1980s, advertized by the Brundtland Commissions report Our Common forthcoming in 1987, and enshrined in the Agenda 21 action plan that emerged from the united Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992.Over the come through decade, the discussion of how S&T could contribute more than effectively to sustainability intensified, involving many researchers, practitioners, scientific academies, and development rganizations from around the world. By the time of the World top side on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg in 2002, a broadly found consensus had begun to take shape on the nearly important ways in which S&T has already contributed to sustainability, on what new R&D is most important, and on what stands in the way of getting it done. Many of the most valuable ploughshares of S&T to sustainable development predate the term itself.These range from the mundane technologies that live improved delivery of basic need for sanitation and cooking, through the yield enhancing, land saving accomplishments of the international verdant research system, to the fundamental scholarship of geographers and anthropologists on nature society interactions. In more recent times, a host of R&D efforts explicitly aimed at promoting sustainability have been launched. These extend from a rich tradition of spurt on energy systems and ecosystem resilience to new initiatives in industrial environmental science and earth system complexity.A feel for the breadth and scope of relevant R&D now afoot(predicate) around the world is suggested by the rapidly growing list of entries on the virtual Forum on knowledge and Technology for Sustainability. However, much upholds to be done. Perhaps the strongest mental object to emerge from intercourses induced by the Johannesburg Summit was that the research community needs to complement its historic role in identifying problems of sustainability with a greater willingness to aggregate with the development and other communities to work on practical solutions to those problems.This means convey our S&T to bear on the highest-priority goals of a sustainability transition, with those goals be non by scientists alone but rather through a dialogue between scientists and the people engaged in the practice of meeting homo needs while conserving the earths life support systems and reducing hunger and scantiness.At the international level, the Johannesburg Summit, building on the United Nations Millennium Declaration, has defined these priorities in terms of the so-called WEHAB targets for water, energy, health, agriculture, and biodiversity. A more systematic psychoanalyze of internationally sanctioned goals and targets for a sustainability transition, together with an evaluation of the state of reportage and assessment on progress in attaining those goals, is provided by Parris and Kates in their contribution to this Special Feature.As important as this international consensus on goals and targets whitethorn be for targeting problem-driven research in support of a sustainability transition, however, it is not sufficient. A joint workshop held by the International Council for Sciences, the Third World honorary society of Science, and the Initiative on Science and Technology for Sustainability concluded that agenda move at the ball-shaped, continental, and even national scale will miss a lot of the most important needs.The transcendent challenge is to help promote the relatively local ( target- or enterprise-based) dialogues from which meaningful priorities can emerge, and to put in place the local support systems that will allow those priorities to be implemented. Where such systems exist, the production of usable, place-based knowledge for promoting sustainability has been impressive indeed. T he commitment of sustainability science to problem-driven agenda panorama does not mean that it has been confined to applied research.Indeed, pursuit of practical solutions to the crush challenges of sustainability has driven the field to tackle an array of fundamental questions. The Friibergh Workshop on Sustainability Science identified a half-dozen such core conceptual questions that have been further developed through the virtual Forum on Science and Technology for Sustainability and are commencement exercise to appear in the context of emerging agendas in other more established fields, such as global environmental change.Examples of the new sorts of research now generator to emerge on several of those core questions are reported elsewhere in this Special Feature Kates and Parris on How are long-term trends in environment and development reshaping naturesociety interactions in ways relevant to sustainability Turner et al. on What determines the vulnerability or resilience of the naturesociety systems in particular(a) kinds of places and for particular types of ecosystems and human livelihoods? and Cash et al. on How can todays relatively sovereign activities of research planning, observation, assessment, and decision support be better commixd into systems for reconciling management and societal learning? The sustainability science program is also beginning to address a range of fundamental observational and methodological challenges.For example, H.J. Schellnhuber and his colleagues at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research have developed mod new answers to the question How can the dynamic interactions between nature and societyincluding lags and inertiabe better incorporated in emerging models and conceptualizations that integrate the Earth system, human development, and sustainability.Wolfgang Lucht, writing in the IHDP Update, summarizes current work on answering How can todays operational systems for monitoring and reporting on env ironmental and social conditions be integrated or extended to provide more useful guidance for efforts to navigate a transition toward sustainability and a number of groups are calling for re-examination of national and international social account measures to include sustainability considerations. Activities to advance the sustainability science program are moving forward on a number of fronts and at scales from the global to the local.One of the more with-it lists of programs and projects is maintained on the Forum on Science and Technology for Sustainability. As an indication of the range of activities underway internationally, the International Council for Science, Third World honorary society of Sciences, Initiative on Science and Technology for Sustainability, and other organizations have organize a Consortium for promoting a coordinated international program of research, capability building, and applications.The Earth System Science Partnership of the Global Environmental compound Programmes has launched a series of Joint Projects on Sustainability focused on problems of nutrient security, water, and carbon management. An increasing number of international science assessments for environmental breastplate (e. g. , the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Millennium Ecosystem Assessments) are incorporating sustainability concerns. And a rapidly expanding set of multi-stakeholder Partnerships for Sustainable Development are developing in the wake of the Johannesburg Summit.An even greater variety of S&T-based efforts are underway at the local, regional, and national levels around the world. The research products of some of these efforts are beginning to appear in the published literature, although many of the relatively local results remain largely unknown beyond their places of origin and application. Sustainability science is not heretofore an autonomous field or discipline, but rather a vibrant arena that is bringing together scholarshi p and practice, global and local perspectives from sexual union and south, and disciplines across the natural and social sciences, engineering, and medicine.Its scope of core questions, criteria for quality envision and membership are consequently in substantial flux and may be expected to remain so for some time. Nonetheless, as the papers included in this Special Feature are meant to suggest, something different is sure as shooting in the air, something that is intellectually exciting, practically compelling, and might as well be called sustainability science.