Challenges in Sustainability | 2013 | Volume 1 | Issue 1 | Pages 1–2

DOI: 10.12924/cis2013.01010001

Editorial

Sustainability: A Path-breaking Idea, but Still Associated

with Huge Challenges

Juergen Peter Kropp

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Telegraphenberg A 31, 14473 Potsdam, Germany;

E-Mail: kropp@pik-potsdam.de

Submitted: 3 May 2013 | Published: 10 May 2013

Sustainability science is a young discipline that started

emerging in the late 20th century, although Hans Carl

von Carlowitz had already introduced ideas about sus-

tainable management of forests in the early 18th cen-

tury. In recent times, the Club of Rome report in 1972

and the Brundtland report in 1987 developed these

concepts further, and subsequently the sustainability

idea became prominent in political debates as well. In

both reports it was recognized that growth would

have certain limits and a different style of resource

utilization was therefore necessary. However, despite

numerous approaches dealing with sustainability, it is

still an important issue.

Nowadays humanity increasingly interferes with

natural systems on a planetary scale. This holds for

many subsystems of the Earth including the climate,

soil and water bodies, and marine systems. During the

20th century, rapid technological development and

demographic pressure advanced to a degree that we

caused radical and unintended changes in the Earth's

integrity. This is observable in certain subsystems, for

example in the atmosphere (global warming), in mar-

ine systems (overexploitation of fish stocks), or in

soils (degradation). One crucial element of sustainabil-

ity is the capacity of natural resources to sustain hu-

man demands. It is foreseeable that parts of the sys-

tem are overburdened beyond their capacity. This

holds likewise for waste disposal, as for the atmo-

sphere (greenhouse gases) and the utilization of re-

sources like ores and renewables like trees and fish.

To sum up, one can state that the overexploitation of

natural resources and economic growth causes envir-

onmental impacts which may lead several systems to

the brink of collapse. In other words, humanity causes

a multitude of problems and most of them are not

grounded in one sector, region, either can they be de-

scribed by one scientific discipline.

Thus, sustainability science is a discipline that can

be placed as the one at the meeting point of different

scientific disciplines. However, during the last four

decades, science made remarkable progress in regard

to an assessment on how climate and global change

will affect livelihood conditions, and how humanity is

accelerating the above mentioned changes. The ques-

tion is how we can avoid certain human activities that

destroy the functionality of certain subsystems of the

Earth and how we can develop potential solutions. It

is a major challenge to understand the dynamics of

man-made environment systems as a basis for the de-

velopment of sustainable transition pathways in the

sense of planetary engineering and management. In

other words, sustainability science addresses the

man-made environment interface.

Although all these points have been well-known for

decades, we need to ask why it is so difficult to

achieve pathbreaking scientific results, which may

help us to develop clear visions of real sustainable de-

velopment. It is well-known that resource consump-

tion is an accompanying factor of economic prosperity

and global resource consumption is still steeply grow-

ing. In some countries we observe—mainly the ad-

vanced ones—that resource consumption stabilizes or

under a Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

even decreases, while their high material intensity is

still managed by exporting it to developing countries.

Thus, the challenge to decouple resource consump-

tion from economic development remains, and it is

not only a question of a green economy, technological

progress, or how natural resources are being utilized.

It is indeed also a societal challenge. Human lifestyle

changes might be a further catalyst for making head-

way towards sustainability. Nevertheless, current pro-

gress into this direction is slow, moreover, in large

parts in the developing countries, we can see a tend-

ency just to copy westernized lifestyles. A real innova-

tion for the world would be a strategic approach for a

sustainable economy that results in social equity and

fairness, risk resilient livelihood conditions, sustainable

resource use, and the avoidance of ecological scarcit-

ies—all these under consideration of planetary bound-

aries.

Nevertheless, sustainability is still an elusive

concept. It is hard to define what sustainability

really implies in terms of environmental constraints

or societal development, in particular on a regional

scale. Consequently, at the beginning of the 21st

century, scientific bodies called for a more system-

atic sustainability science, e.g. International Council

for Science defined sustainability as a major goal in

its research strategies. Despite these efforts, con-

cepts still lack real meaning. Thus, the aim should

be to underpin activities dealing with the general

aspects of sustainability with stronger and sounder

scientific concepts. Questions, like: what exactly is

sustainability? How can we achieve sustainability

targets? And, what does 'being sustainable' mean?

need to be in the foreground. Thus, sustainability

science is environmental systems science.

Although all these points have been intensely dis-

cussed in recent decades, a thrilling and demanding

journey still lies ahead for sustainability science. In re-

gard to methodological terms, we need to encompass

the different magnitudes of scales in terms of time,

space and functions. Thus, sustainability science still

invokes a lot of questions, i.e. we have to tackle, in

particular, the following three challenges: 1) The pro-

vision of a methodological arsenal that allows the de-

scription and analysis of questions of sustainability in

a comparable and transferable manner, i.e. we per-

manently have to ask ourselves what we can learn

from singular cases in terms of the overarching sus-

tainability challenge; 2) Options for solutions at differ-

ent levels, e.g. regional and global, need to be as-

sessed systematically in order to develop pathways

which allow us to achieve predefined environmental

targets, like the 2 °C target agreed in the Copenhagen

Accord 2009; 3) As a lot of strategies are included un-

der the term 'sustainability', there is a need to de-

velop a concept which allows assessment and meas-

urement of success of implemented sustainability

measures.

However, sustainability itself is a challenge, be-

cause it needs ethical decisions from humankind itself

whether we want to live in a safe environment or not.

But how we achieve these safe limits is an issue of

sustainability science, i.e. in terms of how to achieve

these limits and what potential trade-offs there might

be. The new journal Challenges in Sustainability

provides a perfect platform for these goals.