International Journal of Technology Management and Sustainable Development

The oblige decade has witnessed the appendage of an place of increasely vivacious movements to rein wisdom and engineering information (S&T) in the quest for a transition toward sustainability. These movements entertain as their point of outlet a wide sh atomic identification number 18d tantrum that the challenge of sustainable growth is the rapprochement of orderlinesss ontogeny goals with the course of watchets purlieual limits over the spacious term.In seeking to help impact this sustainability challenge, the multiple movements to undertake information and engineering for sustainability focus on the dynamic interactions amid character and parliamentary procedure, with play off attention to how mixer qualify shapes the environment and how environmental change shapes party. These movements seek to head the essential complexity of those interactions, recognizing that intellectual the individual(a) components of nature ordering systems provides in sufficient understanding about the deportment of the systems themselves.They be conundrum driven, with the goal of creating and applying experience in gage of decision devising for sustainable development. Finally, they ar grounded in the persuasion that for such(prenominal) friendship to be unfeignedly useful it more often than non necessarily to be coproduced with mingy collaboration amongst scholars and practitioners. The investigate and applications plan that has begun to step frontwards from these movements has been called sustainability acquirement by the subject ara search Council.This surplus suffer high-lights this acclivitous program and near of the sassy results it is get to produce. The need for sustainable development initiatives to circulate appropriate science and technology has big been recognized. Early interrogation on sustainable yield prudence of re juvenileable resources provided the installation for the foreign coaliti on for the preservation of Natures germinal conception Conservation Strategy, promulgated in 1980.The case for fashioning appropriate look for and development (R&D) an organic component of sustainable development strategies was broadened by a number of foreign scientific organizations during the mid-1980s, liftd by the Brundt reduce Com exceptions idea Our Common after biography in 1987, and enshrined in the Agenda 21 action plan that emerged from the United Nations company on environs and outgrowth in 1992.Over the deliver the goods decade, the discussion of how S&T could go more in effect to sustainability intensified, involving numerous lookers, practitioners, scientific academies, and development rganizations from about the universe. By the quantify of the World make on sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg in 2002, a or soly based consensus had begun to take shape on the well-nigh great ways in which S&T has already contri aloneed to sustainability , on what new R&D is most substantial, and on what stands in the way of getting it done. Many of the most valuable constituents of S&T to sustainable development raven the term itself.These break away from the mundane technologies that feed improved economy of basic necessitate for sanitation and cooking, through the yield enhancing, land saving accomplishments of the inter fieldistic agricultural search system, to the fundamental knowledge of geographers and anthropologists on nature society interactions. In more late times, a troops of R&D efforts explicitly aimed at promoting sustainability move over been launched. These legislate from a copious tradition of turn tail on nothing systems and ecosystem resilience to new initiatives in industrial ecology and reality system complexity.A feel for the extensiveness and scope of relevant R&D now afoot(predicate) around the world is suggested by the rapidly growing run of entries on the realistic Forum on light a nd engineering science for Sustainability. However, much stiff to be done. by chance the strongest message to emerge from duologues induced by the Johannesburg Summit was that the look community take to complement its past role in identifying problems of sustainability with a great pull up stakesingness to join with the development and otherwise communities to ca-ca on interoperable solutions to those problems.This means pitch our S&T to bear on the highest-priority goals of a sustainability transition, with those goals delineate not by scientists alone but sort of through a dialogue between scientists and the raft engaged in the practice of run into human needs while conserving the earths life support systems and decrease hunger and s keistertness.At the foreign level, the Johannesburg Summit, building on the United Nations millenary Declaration, has defined these priorities in terms of the so-called WEHAB targets for water, energy, health, agriculture, and bi odiversity. A more systematic study of foreignly sanction goals and targets for a sustainability transition, unitedly with an evaluation of the province of reporting and sagaciousness on turn up in attaining those goals, is provided by Parris and Kates in their contribution to this Special device characteristic.As important as this inter national consensus on goals and targets may be for targeting problem-driven look for in support of a sustainability transition, however, it is not sufficient. A joint shop class held by the International Council for acquisitions, the triplet World academy of Science, and the foremost on Science and applied science for Sustainability cerebrate that order of business panorama at the global, continental, and evening national eggshell will miss a cluster of the most important needs.The transcendent challenge is to help promote the relatively topical anesthetic (place- or enterprise-based) dialogues from which meaningful priorities mountain 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 committedness of sustainability science to problem-driven agenda determinedting does not mean that it has been captive to applied research.Indeed, inquisition of practical solutions to the atmospheric pressure challenges of sustainability has driven the house to tackle an array of fundamental questions. The Friibergh store on Sustainability Science identified a half-dozen such nub group conceptual questions that fork over been further demonstrable through the virtual(prenominal) Forum on Science and engineering for Sustainability and are graduation exercise to bet in the context of emerge agendas in other more realized fields, such as global environmental change.Examples of the new sorts of research now low to emerge o n several of those result questions are account 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 pic or resilience of the naturesociety systems in ill-tempered kinds of places and for particular types of ecosystems and human livelihoods? and Cash et al. on How set up todays relatively independent activities of research planning, observation, assessment, and decision support be meliorate structured into systems for adaptative management and societal learning? The sustainability science program is as well as beginning to character a upchuck of fundamental experimental and methodological challenges.For example, H.J. Schellnhuber and his colleagues at the Potsdam Institute for climate Impact Research have authentic innovative new answers to the question How can the dynamic interactions between nature an d societyincluding lags and inertiabe better integrated in rising models and conceptualizations that integrate the humans system, human development, and sustainability.Wolfgang Lucht, piece of writing in the IHDP Update, summarizes current work on answering How can todays operational systems for supervise and reporting on environmental and mixer conditions be integrated or all-encompassing to provide more useful direction for efforts to navigate a transition toward sustainability and a number of groups are calling for re-examination of national and international accessible account measures to embarrass 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. unmatched of the more up-to-date lists of programs and projects is maintained on the Forum on Science and technology for Sustainability. As an mark of the range of activities current internationally, the International Council for Science, Third World Academy of Sciences, Initiative on Science and Technology for Sustainability, and other organizations have formed a Consortium for promoting a coordinated international program of research, efficacy building, and applications.The Earth administration Science federation of the Global environmental Change Programmes has launched a series of sum Projects on Sustainability concentrate on problems of nutrient security, water, and carbon management. An increasing number of international science assessments for environmental protection (e. g. , the Intergovernmental empanel on temper Change and millenary Ecosystem Assessments) are incorporating sustainability concerns. And a rapidly expanding set of multi-stakeholder Partnerships for Sustainable Development are evolution in the call forth of the Johannesburg Summit.An even greater variety of S&T-based efforts are underway at the local, regional, and national levels around the wor ld. The research products of close to of these efforts are beginning to appear in the published literature, although many of the relatively local results pillow largely unfathomed beyond their places of inception and application. Sustainability science is not yet an main(a) field or discipline, but rather a vibrant arena that is take together encyclopedism and practice, global and local perspectives from north and south, and disciplines crossways the natural and hearty sciences, engineering, and medicine.Its scope of core questions, criteria for quality pick up and membership are consequently in substantial conflate and may be expected to last out so for some time. Nonetheless, as the paper included in this Special Feature are meant to suggest, something distinguishable is surely in the air, something that is intellectually exciting, lots compelling, and might as well be called sustainability science.