Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 3.3
Sustainability science: birth of a new discipline
Independent scholar Robert W. Kates and others called for the development of a
new discipline: Sustainability Science. In the American journal
Science
, Kates
et al
.
(2001) suggested:
A new field of sustainability science is emerging that seeks to understand the
fundamental character of interactions between nature and society. Such an
understanding must encompass the interaction of global processes with the
ecological and social characteristics of particular places and sectors. The regional
character of much sustainability science means that research will integrate the
effects of key processes across scales from the local to the global. Sustainability
science will require fundamental advances in our ability to address issues such
as the behavior of complex self-organizing systems as well as the responses of
the socio-ecological systems to multiple and interacting stresses such as climate
change, population movement, economic dislocation and so on. Combining
different ways of knowing and learning will permit different social actors to work
in concert, even with much uncertainty and limited information.
Core questions research include:
•
How can the dynamic interactions between nature and society - including lags
and inertia - be better incorporated into emerging models and conceptualizations
integrate the Earth system with human development and sustainability?
•
How are long-term trends in environment and development, including consump-
tion and population, reshaping nature-society interactions in ways relevant to
sustainability?
•
What determines the vulnerability or resilience of the nature-society system in
particular kinds of places, for particular types of ecosystems and for human
livelihoods?
•
Can scientifically meaningful 'limits' be defined that would provide effective
warning of conditions beyond which the nature-society systems incur a
significantly increased risk of serious degradation?
•
What systems of incentive structures, including markets and scientific information,
can effectively improve social capacity to guide interactions between nature and
society in a more sustainable direction?
•
How can today's operational systems for monitoring and reporting environmental
and social conditions be developed to provide better guidance for a transition
toward sustainability?
•
How can today's activities of research planning, monitoring, assessment and
decision support be better integrated into systems for adaptive management
and societal learning?
Source: adapted from Kates
et al
. (2001).
