A new field of Sustainability Science and Engineering is emerging that seeks to understand the fundamental character of interactions between nature and human society and to help steer the impact of humanity's needs on the planet's natural resources towards sustainable trajectories. Sustainability Science and Engineering is unified in clear terms by its ultimate goals but occupies an interdisciplinary position among traditional research fields, spanning both science and engineering and spreading across disciplines as diverse as agriculture, ecology, oceanography, climate studies, economics, a diverse set of social sciences, energy and materials and several additional aspects of engineering, physics, biology, and chemistry. Although Sustainability Science and engineering is by now widely discussed in the scientific and engineering community, and is beginning to be connected to the political agenda for economic and social development, it remains unclear to what extent its many facets are being integrated into a global perspective and whether researchers are utilizing it as a nexus to collaborate across traditional scientific and engineering fields. This project will address such issues by delineating, analyzing, and mapping both basic research on sustainability. Specifically, a comprehensive dataset of scholarly publications, patents, research grants, policy documents and popular science pieces that together define the integrated knowledge of the field will be compiled.
Analysis results will be presented as tables, graphs, and in form of geospatial and science maps. Sustainability experts will be invited to interpret these results. Findings will be presented, discussed, and disseminated via scholarly publications, online, and at a workshop on the topic of sustainability. Encouraging timely scientific and engineering progress across a large set of traditional disciplines requires generating a global perspective (a view 'from above') to determine the most effective actions and incentives to be created by governments, funding agencies, non-governmental organizations, the scientific community, and the public at large. This work will map the current state of sustainability science and engineering worldwide and provide actionable insights into its future development. The resulting maps will be useful for communicating the state of the art as well as to point out challenges and opportunities. They might be extended and adopted as a visual interface into research and practice of Sustainability Science and Engineering. Several graduate students will be involved and trained in this project.
