Origins, justification, development and current state of the art of sustainability science

Mohammad Rashedul Hoque

Sostenipra research group, Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona, UAB campus, Bellaterra, 08193 Barcelona, Spain MohammadRashedul.Hoque@uab.cat

Abstract. The main focus of sustainability science, which is an emerging multidisciplinary approach to science and resource management, is on the dynamic interactions between nature and society. This article describes the evolution of sustainable development (SD), contribution of science and technology to the SD, how the socio-economic variation affecting the global sustainability, and justification of SD through integrated sustainability assessment (ISA) approach. Effective advancement toward sustainability goals can be achieved through scientific knowledge and disseminating those knowledge in a broader perspective for the wellbeing of mankind. On the other hand, understanding the consumption pattern and making a balance of per-capita resource use among the developed and developing world is critically important for long-term sustainability. Keywords: Sustainable development, resource management, scientific knowledge, integrated sustainability assessment.

Introduction

The General Assembly of the United Nations in 1982 initiated the World Commission on Environment and Development (WECD) and its report, Our Common Future, was published in 1987. The WECD was named as Brundland commission as it was chaired by then Prime Minister of Norway Gro Harlem Brundtland. The report states that human needs are basic and essential; that economic growth, but also equity to share resources with the poor, is required to sustain them; and that equity is encouraged by effective citizen participation. The commissions root was in the 1972 Stockholm conference on the Human Environment, where the conflicts between the environment and development were first acknowledged. In 1980 World conservation strategy of the international union for the conservation of nature, which argued for conservation as a means to assist development and specifically for the sustainable development and utilization of species, ecosystem and resources, the Brundland commission started its work committed to the unity of the environment and development. The sustainable development was defined by the Brundtland Commission as the ability to make development sustainable - to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own

needs is one of the most accepted definitions among the many other definitions. The use of this definition has led many to see sustainable development as having a major focus on intergenerational equity. The Brundland commissions report was followed by major international meetings and in 1992 the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro (the so-called Earth Summit) issued a declaration of principles, a detailed Agenda 21 of desired actions, international agreements on climate change and biodiversity, and a statement of principles on forests. Ten years later, in 2002, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, the commitment to sustainable development was reaffirmed. In the interim, sustainable development as a concept, as a goal, and as a movement spread rapidly and is now central to the mission of countless international organizations, national institutions, corporate enterprises, and locales. Sustainability science is an emerging multi-disciplinary approach to science and resource management that focuses on the dynamic interactions between nature and society. The systems of rules, procedures and expectations that guide social interactions shape both the challenges of, and the opportunities for, sustainability. In 1995, the Board on Sustainable Development of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences sought to make sustainable development more meaningful to scientific analysis and contributions. To do so, the board decided to focus on a two-generation time horizon and to address the needs of a global population with half as many more people as there are todayneeds that, if met successfully, are not likely to be repeated within the next century or two because of the demographic transition (Robert et al 2005). While the relevance of Science and Technology (ST) to sustainable development is generally acknowledged, a large gap persists between what the ST community thinks it has to offer, and what society has demanded and supported. For each success story about using ST to promote sustainable development, there are many missed opportunities and outright failures. Science and technology are increasingly recognized to be central part of both the origins of sustainability challenges, and to the prospects for successfully dealing with them. 2 Science and Technology: Steps toward Sustainability

Increasing the demand for Science and Technology (ST) will require increasing public and political awareness of the nature and magnitude of the challenges posed by transitions to sustainability. Partnership with all major stakeholders is necessary, including the private sector, the public health sector and civil society. Indigenous and traditional knowledge must play a greater role in addressing sustainability challenges. For knowledge to be effective in advancing sustainable development goals, it must be accountable to more than peer review. In particular, it must be sufficiently reliable or credible to justify people risking action upon it. In addition, it is essential to understand what sorts of institutions can best perform these complex bridging roles between science and policy, and across scales and across the social and natural science disciplines, under a wide range of social circumstances. ST cannot effectively contribute to sustainable development without basic scientific and technological capacity. It is necessary to build capacity in interdisciplinary research, understanding complex systems, dealing with irreducible uncertainty, and to integrate across fields of

knowledge, as well as harness and build capacity for technological innovation and diffusion in both the private and public sectors (ICSU report 2005). Sustainability depends on building and maintaining the adaptive capacity needed to deal with the shocks, surprises and longer term structural transformations that are increasingly characterizing our world. The capacity for ST to contribute to sustainable development depends greatly on whether todays young scientists and engineers can find ways to contribute. To do so it will have to take societys goals of sustainable development seriously. These goals vary for different groups in different places, with much debate over just what is to be developed, what is to be sustained, in what relation, and for how long. Society generally acknowledges the important role of ST in calling attention to potential problems resulting from the interactions between human development and the environment. The most important aspects of ST should be to contribute to solutions for sustainable developmentnot just to identification of problems.

Science and technology for sustainability: Challenges

To mobilize science and technology for sustainable development is the main challenge. For mobilization it is necessary to assure that ST conducted toward sustainability should be focused on the most pressing problems of sustainable development as defined by stakeholders in those problems. Secondly, most the most appropriate ST is indeed mobilize in the service of particular problems. It is obvious that a restructuring of the funding for ST at all levels from the local to the global level will be essential if it is to substantially increase its contribution to sustainability. The strategies for funding the science aspects of the ST for sustainable development differ markedly from those appropriate to the technology aspects. More detailed analyses of the whole range of issues regarding the technology aspects of sustainable development, including financial strategies, is essential and must be addressed. The per-capita consumption level of developed and developing societies around the world has a huge difference. Consumption of household goods, energy and other materials has reached to a high era in the industrialized nations, which is putting a remarkable stress upon the environment and the natural resources. In contrast, a large segment of population in the developing countries struggle for consumption of foods and basic needs, posing severe health concerns and limiting productive livelihoods. In recent decades, considerable attention and resources have been devoted to technology-oriented approaches to reduce pollution and increase efficiencies of material and energy use. These are critically important efforts, but in terms of achieving transitions to sustainability, it is necessary to develop a more holistic understanding of production/consumption systems. 4 Integration of sustainability wings

The United Nations Environment Programme (Division of Technology, Industry, and Economics) has numerous activities for promoting environmentally-sound technologies and industrial management practices, and building worldwide linkages among

industry leaders and experts in clean, efficient production technologies (ICSU report 2005) The enhancement of such efforts could be done by engaging different segments of ST community to work on these issues. For developing efficient mechanism to monitor and control the aggregate levels of consumption and resource use, it is necessary to integrate the sociological analyses, economic and political science studies. Furthermore, ecologists, chemists, physicists, and other basic sciences are crucial to continue advancing the technological development. People and nature interact in dynamic social-ecological systems that are adaptive and sometimes self organizing, that exhibit non-linear, emergent behaviour, and that have characteristic dynamics that play out at various spatial and temporal scales with strong cross scale interactions. Understanding the linkages across these scales is essential to understanding environment human interactions. Speaking about science and technology for sustainable development has become a common practice in the recent years. However, this paradigm might have been expanded to encompass the concept of innovation. Innovation can be described as the means by which individuals and groups apply their creative, adaptive capacities and their social, organizational, and institutional knowledge for the generation and application of new scientific and technical knowledge. In the following figure it has been figured out how different segments interlinked in a capacitized sustainable environment.

Fig. 1. An alternative view of the conceptual framework, emphasizing the temporal nature of the processes involved (ICSU report 2005).

Justification: Integrated Sustainability Assessment as a tool

In MATISSE (Methods and Tools for Integrated Sustainability Assessment) project, Integrated Sustainability Assessment (ISA) has been defined as a cyclical, participatory process of scoping, envisioning, experimenting, and learning through which a shared interpretation of sustainability for a specific context is developed and applied in an integrated manner, in order to explore solutions to persistent problems of unsustainable development (www.matisse-project.net). ISA is conceptualized as a support to longer-term and more strategic policy processes, where the objective is to explore persistent problems of unsustainable development. A conceptual framework has been developed to deal with this multidimensional complexity of ISA. The goal is to develop a shared interpretation of sustainability among stakeholders for a particular location, region or country, and explore various solution directions for a transition towards sustainability through a range of innovative experiments. Sustainability assessment is still dominated by neo-classical thinking and it is broadly acknowledged that a neo-classical approach is inadequate for addressing the multidimensionality and complexity of sustainable development (Jaeger et al., 1998). Integrated assessment aims to analyze the multiple causes and impacts of a complex problem in order to develop policy options for a strategic solution of the problem in question. Sustainable development runs cross several disciplines and cannot be addressed adequately from a mono-disciplinary viewpoint. The human behaviour dimension of sustainable development needs to be addressed from micro-economics, social psychology and artificial intelligence; the ecological dimension by ecology, ecological economics and economic valuation theory, the social-cultural dimension by anthropology, sociology and social geography, and the institutional component by institutional economics and social psychology (MATISSE working paper 1, 2006). In this way we can build up a systemic puzzle, where the various cross-disciplinary concepts form the pieces of the sustainability puzzle need to be combined and integrated. To address the complexity of SD we need to develop the next generation of ISAtools, in particular the next generation of IA methods. These should handle multiple scales, in particular micro-scale dynamics that can deal with the dynamic behaviour of actors, and are rooted in a new paradigm, that is rooted in complex systems theory, evolutionary economics, multi-level governance and multi-agent modelling. It can be described in terms of common characteristics: (i) better integration of science; (ii) coevolution of subsystems and underlying driving forces; (iii) more explorative than predictive; and (iv) more demand (stakeholder)- oriented than supply-oriented (Weaver, P. M., Rotmans, J., 2006). 6 Conclusion

The conflicts between the environment and development were first acknowledged in 1972 Stockholm conference on the Human Environment. Since then interaction between nature and society has been closely observed through sustainability approaches. Brundtland Commissions definition of sustainable development, ability to make development sustainable - to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, has led a lot

to see sustainable development as having major focus on intergenerational equity. Development of technology has a great influence on per capita consumption pattern. Societys goals of SD vary for different groups in different places, with much debate over just what is to be developed, what is to be sustained, in what relation, and for how long. Proper understanding of socio-ecological imbalance may lead to find out the effective way of resource management for a sustainable society. References

1. Costanza R. (2003). "Early History of Ecological Economics and ISEE." Internet Encyclopaedia of Ecological Economics. 2. Adams, W.M. (2006). The Future of Sustainability: Re-thinking Environment and Development in the Twenty-first Century. Report of the IUCN Renowned Thinkers Meeting, 29-31 January, 2006. 3. Harnessing science, technology and innovation for sustainable development. A report from the ICSU-ISTS-TWAS Consortium ad hoc Advisory Group, 2005. 4. Holling, C. S. (2001). Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems. 5. Jaeger, C.C., Renn, O., Rosa, E.A. and Webler, T. (1998), Decision analysis and rational action, in Human Choice and Climate Change, Rayner, S. and Malone, E.L., Batelle Press, Ohio, U.S.A. 6. Javier, F. (1999). The knowledge management movement: Current drives and future scenarios. 7. Kates, R., Parris, T. & Leiserowitz, A. (2005). What is Sustainable Development? Environment 47(3): 8-21. 8. Loorbach, D. (2007). Governance for Sustainability. Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy 3(2): 1-4. 9. Lotze-Campen, H. (2008). The role of modelling tools in Integrated Sustainability Assessment (ISA). Int. J. Innovation and Sustainable Development, Vol. 3, Nos. 1/2, 2008. 10. Moore, K. (2006). Science and sustainable development. 11. Rotmans, J. (2005). Societal innovation between dream and reality lies complexity. Science and Technology for Sustainable Development. Consensus Report and Background Document, Mexico City Synthesis Conference, 2002. 12. Weaver, P. M., Rotmans, J., 2006. Integrated sustainability assessment. MATISSE working paper 1, 2006. 13. Zylicz, T. (2007). The role of science in sustainable development policy.