Constructing sustainability science: emerging perspectives and research trajectories

How can landscape ecology contribute to sustainability science?

“…Reflective papers on the progress in sustainability research have produced important insights in key features and enabling factors that determine how science may contribute to transitions towards sustainability (Lang et al 2012;Miller 2013;Miller et al 2014;Fischer et al 2015;Balvanera et al 2017 andSchäpke et al 2017). For landscape ecologists, we think the following four insights are of particular relevance.…”

“…Therefore, science can identify a sustainable landscape only in dialogue with these stakeholders. This dialogue is a fundamental connection between scientific knowledge and human experiences in local landscapes (Miller 2013), and should allow for choices about the future landscape to be expressed by mixed groups of stakeholders (including policy makers). For example, in a modelling approach with socioeconomic scenarios that facilitates building a vision about a future landscape, scientists should select indicators for sustainability in dialogue with stakeholders and determine with them which are the required levels of those indicators to meet the sustainability aims of local society.…”

Defining transformative climate science to address high-end climate change

“…In addition, research focusing on transformation and sustainability is advancing in the making of a richer representation of agency, mainly using more complex system perspectives in modelling as well as assessment tools and methods. In this guise, the need to understand and integrate the role played by values, visions, and conflicting interests is triggering a whole new array of methodological innovations with the purpose of developing more robust knowledge about possible transformative strategies and solutions supportive of sustainable development (Clark et al 2016;van Kerkhoff and Lebel, 2006;van der Kerkhoff 2014;Miller 2013;Miller et al 2013;Lynam et al 2007). More broadly, this can be seen as part of a general trend to:…”

“…BNormal^or traditional procedures of science, amply influenced by positivist thinking, were unable to deal with the large-scale and irreducible uncertainties and the conflicts derived from assessments which inevitably had to include strong ethical and normative decisions (Jamieson 2014;Gardiner 2011;Owen et al 2012;Rotmans et al 2008;Funtowicz & Ravetz 1991, Jäger 1998. With all this background, transformation research has been particularly taken up by sustainability science (Mauser et al 2013;Miller 2013;Miller et al 2013;Wiek et al 2012;Ostrom 2009), and more recently, with the proposal of developing global systems science (GSS) , with special emphasis on finding Bglobally interconnected systems of solutions to global problems^of which climate change is but one. These approaches have contributed to introducing a transformation focus in climate assessment procedures in which the integration with sustainable development principles and goals is included.…”

Sustainability science as if the world mattered: sketching an art contribution by comparison

“…Salient journals in the field do not enlist artists as their potential contributors or readers (e.g., Sustainability Science, Sustainability, Sustainable Development; see also http://www.futureearth.org/who-we-are). Founding articles of this "vibrant arena that is bringing together scholarship and practice, global and local perspectives from north and south, and disciplines across the natural and social sciences, engineering, and medicine" (Clark and Dickson 2003:8060) have also not explicitly emphasized the importance of art as a contributing practice (Clark and Dickson 2003, Komiyama and Takeuchi 2006, Bettencourt and Kaur 2011, Kates 2011, Miller 2013. However, in the face of massive engagement of artists in the field of sustainability knowledge production and action (Weintraub 2012, Klingan et al 2015, Neal 2015, it must be asked if the approaches are to remain separated and if sustainability science might not benefit from (taking a closer look at) art (and vice versa).…”