Current Research in Environmental Sustainability

Current Research in Environmental Sustainability publishes new and innovative research on environmental sustainability. Environmental sustainability focusses on managing and protecting the natural resource cycles, habitats, materials and the social conditions and relationships that support and maintain functioning ecosystems that provide for human wellbeing. This involves identifying the biophysical, ecological, and social, regional and planetary resources and also includes evaluation of the adverse symptoms such as soil degradation, water depletion, nutrient imbalances, climate change, and biodiversity decline and community stress. Environmental sustainability involves complex dynamics, time lags, spatial effects over long distances (e.g. teleconnections), and inequalities in beneficiaries and recipients. Environmental sustainability thus means maintaining, regenerating, and improving natural capital, while achieving social and economic goals.

Current Research in Environmental Sustainability thus aims to stimulate scientifically grounded, interdisciplinary, multi-scale debate and exchange of research. It will contain original and innovative new research that is relevant to the broader domain of environmental sustainability; that links to the other sustainability domains; that crosses disciplinary boundaries and understanding. Current Research in Environmental Sustainability thus emphasizes the actual interdisciplinary sustainability research approaches, the solutions it provides, and their dissemination and application.

Environmental sustainability also occupies an increasingly important position on the corporate, NGO, and governmental agendas worldwide. More and more organizations are realizing the importance of environmental initiatives in their development and brand promotion. Decrease in energy and raw material usage combined with reduced emissions and waste generation can tackle a host environmental challenges. Leading IT companies, for example, invest in renewable on-site energy sources. Clean manufacturing practices and energy-efficient equipment design are hallmarks of environmental sustainability. An increasing number of organizations use sustainability issues to educate and change consumer behaviour. Finally, environmental benchmarking and reporting are state-of-the-art approaches to facilitate a sustainability transition. Interdisciplinary sustainability research can accelerate this transition process and helps to assess undesired environmental consequences in the (near) future.

The subject of environmental sustainability is thus diverse and includes diverse themes, including environmental change issues; system dynamics and sustainability; sustainability governance and transformation; and sustainability science. These interdisciplinarity themes explicitly allow for a flexible integration of natural sciences with the social sciences, humanities, and engineering disciplines. These themes thus cover major global-change systems and solutions, the emerging new transdisciplinary sustainability science, as part of the evolving UN's sustainable development goals, and a more methodological, quantitative, and systemic reflection on approaches of sustainability science.