The paper “Transforming Sustainability Science to Generate Positive Social and Environmental Change Globally” by Paul Shrivastava, Mark Stafford Smith, Karen O’Brien and Laszlo Zsolnai was published in One Earth (Vol. 2, April 2020).
The authors argue that despite decades-long efforts of sustainability science and related policy and action programs, humanity did not get closer to global sustainability. With its focus on the natural sciences, sustainability science is not able to contribute sufficiently to the global transition to sustainability.
The paper argues for transforming sustainability science into a transdisciplinary enterprise that can generate positive social and environmental change globally. In such transformation the social sciences, humanities and the arts can play an important role to address the problems of culture, institutions and human behavior related to sustainability. To realize a truly integrated sustainability science, we need to renew research and public policies that can reshape the research ecosystem of universities, funding agencies, science communications, and policy/decision making. Sustainability science must also engage with society and creatively employ all available sources of knowledge in favor of creating a sustainable earth.
Scientific pursuit of knowledge involves much more than constructing accurate and analytically powerful representations of the world. Knowledge should inspire people to both reflect and act. To change society for the better we need to creatively activate and employ all available sources of human knowledge in favor of creating an equitable and sustainable Earth.
Full access to this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332220301615