Sustainability Science: A room of its own

Abstract

Sustainability science has emerged over the last two decades as a vibrant field of research and innovation. Today, the field has developed a core research agenda, an increasing flow of results, and a growing number of universities committed to teaching its methods and findings. Like “agricultural science” and “health science,” sustainability science is a field defined by the problems it addresses rather than by the disciplines it employs. In particular, the field seeks to facilitate what the National Research Council has called a “transition toward sustainability,” improving society's capacity to use the earth in ways that simultaneously “meet the needs of a much larger but stabilizing human population, … sustain the life support systems of the planet, and … substantially reduce hunger and poverty” (1). In early 2005, Bruce Alberts and Ralph Cicerone, in their respective roles as outgoing and incoming presidents of the National Academy of Sciences, proposed that the maturing field of sustainability science might be ready for a “room of its own” in PNAS. After a committee study and extended discussion, the PNAS Editorial Board approved a new section on Sustainability Science, which now shares the masthead with other long-term residents such as Physics, Genetics, and Cell Biology. This editorial constitutes a progress report on the field itself and on the role of PNAS in fostering its development. Research relevant to the goals of sustainable development has long been pursued from bases as diverse as geography and geochemistry, ecology and economics, or physics and political science. Increasingly, however, a core sustainability science research program has begun to take shape that transcends the concerns of its foundational disciplines and focuses instead on understanding the complex dynamics that arise from interactions between human and environmental systems. Central questions (2) include the following. How can those dynamic interactions be …