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POLICY FORUM: ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
Meeting fundamental human needs while preserving the life-support systems of planet Earth is the essence of sustainable development, an idea that emerged in the early 1980s from scientific perspectives on the relation between nature and society (1). During the late '80s and early '90s, however, much of the science and technology community became increasingly estranged from the preponderantly societal and political processes that were shaping the sustainable development agenda. This is now changing as efforts to promote a sustainability transition emerge from international scientific programs, the world's scientific academies, and independent networks of scientists (2).
Core Questions
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 (3). The regional character of much of what sustainability science is trying to explain means that relevant research will have to integrate the effects of key processes across the full range of scales from local to global (4). It will also require fundamental advances in our ability to address such issues as the behavior of complex self-organizing systems as well as the responses, some irreversible, of the nature-society system to multiple and interacting stresses. Combining different ways of knowing and learning will permit different social actors to work in concert, even with much uncertainty and limited information.
With a view toward promoting the research necessary to achieve such advances, we propose an initial set of core questions for sustainability science (see the table on page 642). These are meant to focus research attention on both the fundamental character of interactions between nature and society and on society's capacity to guide those interactions along more sustainable trajectories.
Research Strategies
The sustainability science that is necessary to address these questions differs to a considerable degree in structure, methods, and content from science as we know it. In particular, sustainability science will need to do the following: (i) span the range of spatial scales between such diverse phenomena as economic globalization and local farming practices, (ii) account for both the temporal inertia and urgency of processes like ozone depletion, (iii) deal with functional...