Aims and scope
Aims and Scope
The journal Sustainability Science offers insights into interactions within and between nature and the rest of human society, and the complex mechanisms that sustain both. The journal promotes science based predictions and impact assessments of global change, and seeks ways to ensure that such knowledge can be understood by society and be used to strengthen the resilience of global natural systems (such as ecosystems, ocean and atmospheric systems, nutrient cycles), social systems (economies, governments, industry) and human systems at the individual level (lifestyles, health, security, and human values).
Sustainability Science journal provides a trans-disciplinary platform for contributing to building sustainability science as an evolving academic discipline focusing on topics not addressed by conventional disciplines. As a problem-driven discipline, sustainability science is concerned with addressing practical challenges caused by climate change, habitat and biodiversity loss, and poverty among others. At the same time it tries to investigate root causes of problems by uncovering new knowledge or combining current knowledge from more than one discipline in a holistic way to enhance understanding of sustainability. The journal especially encourages research on the needs of developing countries for poverty reduction, education, sustainable development and human and environmental security (open access is available to Sustainability Science through the Developing Country Initiative, including Online Access to Research on Environment (OARE): http://oare.oaresciences.org). Such new knowledge can directly inform policy and management decisions.
Ultimately the journal sees the use of such research, in collaboration with industry, governments, and the public, as a basis for helping to build a resource-circulating society, alleviating population, food, water, climate-change pressures, and transforming the socioeconomic structure of contemporary society into a sustainable one. With this in mind, the journal provides a multidisciplinary forum for communication among researchers, policy makers, practitioners, educators, and the young generation.
Preferred Submissions
Authors are encouraged to be problem oriented, proposing visions, methods, and policy recommendations for sustaining natural and human systems and their linkages. Submissions may be focused on practical problems, or alternatively they can review current multidisciplinary knowledge and show how particular areas of some disciplines directly but incompletely address a sustainability issue. Compiling these fragmented ideas into a holistic overview incorporating proximal and root causes, different from the narrow perspective of a single discipline, can offer new possible solutions. Research exhibiting the following characteristics of sustainability science is especially welcome:
- considers the influence of multiple systems, or complex cause-and-effect relationships
- explicitly considers uncertainty
- sets an appropriate scale of time and space
- considers outcomes beyond the timeline of the study
- makes predictions or compares future scenarios
- takes a position based on values
- aims to effect change in actions or thinking
- co-produces knowledge with participation of stakeholders