Sustainability Science

Emergence of Sustainability Science

Sustainability science reflects several decades of scholarship in the fields of natural resource sciences and technology. Indeed, the use of the term sustainability can be traced back to a 1712 book, Sylvicultura Oeconomica, by the German scientist and forester Hans Carl von Carlowitz. Intellectual contributions on sustainability also come from pioneering scholarship on human-environment interaction by the geographer and anthropologist Peter Glacken in his seminal work Traces on the Rhodian Shore, the work of the agricultural economists Yujiro Hay ami and Vernon Ruttan on land-saving and yield-enhancing technologies, and the insights from Earth-friendly and user-friendly technology, also termed appropriate technology, following the economist E. F. Schumacher's publication of his famous book Small Is Beautiful. However, a more academic perspective on sustainability emerged during the environmental movement of the 1970s as well as from the seminal document The World Conservation Strategy, published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 1980.

Much of today's work on sustainability science is inspired by the landmark Brundtland Commission report on sustainable development, published in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). This report argued that the complex challenge of environmental degradation should be integrated with the equally complex challenges of human development and poverty alleviation, suggesting that both challenges need to be resolved simultaneously and in a mutually reinforcing way. Additional impetus to sustainability science was given at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. The conference's Rio Declaration and Agenda 21 together developed detailed strategies, action plans, and resource needs for attaining sustainable development in the 21st century.

While Agenda 21 exhibited a much needed political and moral appeal, the global community remained divided about the meaning and practice of sustainability. The United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), established in the wake of the Rio conference to monitor and report on the agreement reached in Rio, provided a sobering appraisal of the first decade of the effort to realize the vision of sustainable development in the 1997 Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly. The report concluded that no significant progress had been made on the sustainable development front despite the limelight that the concept received at the global meeting.

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