The challenges of achieving a sustainable future for humanity are among the most crucial facing society today. To understand the complex and dynamic interconnections among human and environmental systems, and to mobilize that knowledge to inform effective management and policy making, will require increasingly powerful quantitative tools, building upon but expanding dramatically the approaches available for modeling, prediction and analysis of climate systems, ecosystems and socio-economic systems. To address these challenges, the organizers will hold a workshop in Winter 2009 to bring together scientists and practitioners from across a broad spectrum of disciplines, to identify crucial open research questions whose solution would advance the field by quantum levels. Our hope is that the products of this workshop will help guide priorities for funding of research on sustainability.
As the world’s population continues to increase, and to place greater per capita and cumulative demands on natural resources, science and society face the great challenge of charting a pathway towards sustainability, promoting development that enhances human well-being without compromising the ability of Earth’s life-support systems to continue to provide the services on which humans depend. Maintaining sustainability implies preserving crucial aspects of biological diversity, discovering and developing new and sustainable sources of energy, and creating the economic and societal foundations that can support the needs of a growing world population. Achieving these objectives will require new advances in technology coupled with a better scientific understanding of the functioning of the planet and of human activities. The science of sustainability must build on existing disciplines, from ethics and the social sciences to biology, mathematics, computation and the physical sciences, in partnership with applied disciplines of engineering and management. Crucial however is the recognition that no discipline can attach these problems in isolation; addressing them will require cross-talk across disciplines, and the development of a nascent science of sustainability that is much more than its component parts. To identify the needs and potentialities of this new science, the project assembled forty international experts from a diversity of disciplines at Airlie Center, in Warrenton, Virginia, in late 2009 to produce an authoritative report that was intended to serve as a blueprint for research directions. The report has been available on the NSF website, and has served as the touchstone for later reports and publications in a variety of venues, including especially the output of a workshop held at Rutgers University, under the auspices of DIMACS, on challenges for the mathematical sciences. Indeed, mathematics is at the core of the emergent challenges, as evidenced not only by the various reports but by the successful 2013 launch of the Mathematics of Planet Earth program, which has been responsive in substantive ways to the challenges identified in the output from this project.
