'International Journal of Technology Management and Sustainable Development\r'

'The perish decade has witnessed the step forwardnce of an array of increasingly vibrant movements to govern comprehension and technology (S&T) in the quest for a transition toward sustainability. These movements take as their point of departure a widely divided view that the challenge of sustainable study is the rapprochement of societys development goals with the planets environmental limits over the long term.\r\nIn wanting to armed service meet this sustainability challenge, the multiple movements to harness intelligence and technology for sustainability focus on the high-voltage interactions among record and society, with equal attention to how amicable change mannequins the environment and how environmental change shapes society. These movements seek to address the essential complexity of those interactions, recognizing that understanding the private components of nature society systems provides insufficient understanding intimately the behaviour of the syst ems themselves.\r\nThey are problem goaded, with the goal of creating and applying cognition in leap out of decision make for sustainable development. Finally, they are grounded in the belief that for much(prenominal)(prenominal) friendship to be truly multipurpose it generally contains to be â€Å"coproduced” with close collaboration between scholars and practitioners. The research and applications program that has begun to emerge from these movements has been called sustainability cognition by the National Research Council.\r\nThis special(prenominal) Feature high-lights this acclivitous program and some of the new results it is inauguration 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 nucleotide for the Inter field of study Union for the Conservation of Natures seminal domain of a function Conservation Strategy, published in 1980.\r\nThe case for making appropriate research and development (R&D) an entire component of sustainable development strategies was broadened by a number of external scientific organizations during the mid-1980s, promoted by the Brundt grime Commissions piece Our Common Future in 1987, and enshrined in the agendum 21 action plan that emerged from the United Nations convention on Environment and Development in 1992.\r\n over the succeeding decade, the discussion of how S&T could contribute much effectively to sustainability intensified, involving numerous researchers, practitioners, scientific academies, and development rganizations from virtually the world. By the time of the realness gain on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg in 2002, a broadly based consensus had begun to take shape on the near important ways in which S&T has already contributed to sustainability, on what new R&D is most important, and on w hat stands in the way of getting it done. more of the most valuable contributions of S&T to sustainable development predate the term itself.\r\nThese betray from the â€Å"mundane technologies” that sop up improved delivery of tin canonical inescapably for sanitation and cooking, through the yield enhancing, land saving accomplishments of the intertheme agricultural research system, to the constitutional apprehension 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 calculate on energy systems and ecosystem resilience to new initiatives in industrial ecology and earth system complexity.\r\nA feel for the breadth and scope of germane(predicate) R&D now underway around the world is suggested by the rapidly growing call of entries on the virtual â€Å" fabrication on intuition and engine room for Sustainability”. However, much stick arounds to be done. by chance the strongest message to emerge from dialogues induced by the Johannesburg Summit was that the research community needs to complement its past role in identifying problems of sustainability with a greater willingness to nitty-gritty with the development and other communities to work on applicative solutions to those problems.\r\nThis means bringing our S&T to bear on the highest-priority goals of a sustainability transition, with those goals defined non by scientists alone but rather through a dialogue between scientists and the people meshed in the practice of â€Å"meeting gentlemans gentleman needs while conserving the earths life turn out systems and reducing aridness and poverty”.\r\nAt the international level, the Johannesburg Summit, building on the United Nations Millennium Declaration, has defined these priorities in monetary value of the so-called â€Å"WEHAB” targets for water, energy, health, agriculture, and biodiversity. A more systematic call for of internationally sanctioned goals and targets for a sustainability transition, together with an valuation of the state of account and assessment on appear in attaining those goals, is provided by Parris and Kates in their contribution to this Special Feature.\r\nAs important as this international consensus on goals and targets may 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 experiences, the Third domain of a function honorary society of Science, and the Initiative on Science and Technology for Sustainability cerebrate that â€Å"agenda chastenting at the global, continental, and even national scale will miss a bundle of the most important needs.\r\nThe transcendent challenge is to help promote the comparatively `local (place- 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. The commitment of sustainability science to problem-driven agenda setting does not mean that it has been hold in to â€Å"applied” research.\r\nIndeed, pursuit of practical solutions to the pressing challenges of sustainability has driven the field to tackle an array of fundamental questions. The Friibergh shop class on Sustainability Science identified a half-dozen such core conceptual questions that have been further highly-developed through the virtual Forum on Science and Technology for Sustainability and are root system to appear in the context of emerging agendas in other more established fields, such as global environmental change.\r\nExamples of the new sorts of research now beginning to emerge on several of those core questions are report elsewhere in this Special Feature: Kates and Parris on â€Å"How are long-term trends in environment and development reshaping natureâ€society interactions in ways relevant to sustainability”; Turner et al. on â€Å"What determines the vulnerability or resilience of the natureâ€society systems in busy kinds of places and for particular types of ecosystems and human livelihoods? ; and Cash et al. on â€Å"How can todays comparatively independent activities of research planning, observation, assessment, and decision support be better merged into systems for adaptive management and societal learning? ” The sustainability science program is also beginning to address a range of fundamental experimental and methodological challenges.\r\nFor example, H. J. Schellnhuber and his colleagues at the Potsdam Institute for Climate conflict Research have developed innovative new answers to the question â€Å"How can the dy namic interactions between nature and societyâ€including lags and inertiaâ€be better integrate in emerging models and conceptualizations that integrate the Earth system, human development, and sustainability.\r\nWolfgang Lucht, writing in the IHDP Update, summarizes current work on answering â€Å"How can todays operational systems for monitoring and reporting on environmental 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.\r\nvirtuoso of the more up-to-date lists of programs and projects is maintained on the Forum on Science and Technology for Sustainability. As an interpretation of the range of a ctivities underway internationally, the International Council for Science, Third World Academy of Sciences, Initiative on Science and Technology for Sustainability, and other organizations have formed a crime syndicate for promoting a coordinated international program of research, mental object building, and applications.\r\nThe Earth System Science Partnership of the orbiculate Environmental sort Programmes has launched a series of â€Å" give voice Projects on Sustainability” focused on problems of food security, water, and speed of light management. An increasing number of international science assessments for environmental protection (e. g. , the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Millennium Ecosystem Assessments) are incorporating sustainability concerns. And a rapidly expanding set of multi-stakeholder â€Å"Partnerships for Sustainable Development” are developing in the wake of the Johannesburg Summit.\r\nAn 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 yet an independent 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 immanent and social sciences, engineering, and medicine.\r\nIts scope of core questions, criteria for quality statement and membership are consequently in authentic flux and may be expected to remain so for some time. Nonetheless, as the papers include in this Special Feature are meant to suggest, something divers(prenominal) is surely â€Å"in the air,” something that is intellectually exciting, practically compelling, and efficacy as well be called â €Å"sustainability science. ”\r\n'