Sustainability Science Project: Characterizing a Transition toward Sustainability

The project explores the long-term trends in nature and society that serve as currents that can be used to navigate towards a sustainability transition in the 21st century. It systematically characterizes the sustainability transition; analyzes major trends, their driving forces, and interactions; and determines how they relate to alternative future scenarios of sustainability. A sustainability transition is seen as one where a stabilizing world population meets its needs and reduces hunger and poverty while maintaining the planet’s life-support systems and living resources.

How do long-term trends affect a transition to sustainability? The project describes 10 major classes and 26 long-term global and regional trends that make a sustainability transition more feasible as well as more difficult. The trends include five that address human needs and five for life-support systems and living resources: peace and security; population, migration, and urbanization; affluence/poverty, well-being, and health; production, consumption, and technology; globalization, governance, and institutions; rapid environmental change and changing problems; atmosphere; oceans; land; and freshwater. The potential to slow or accelerate each trend is assessed. The analysis finds that making a sustainability transition by 2050 is unlikely. The current pace of meeting such human needs as feeding, nurturing, educating, housing, and employing the growing population, while improving, is well behind the pace needed to realize such international targets as halving the number of hungry people or providing clean water and sanitation. At the same time, the absolute growth in threats to Earth’s life-support systems from the world’s production and consumptions systems still exceeds the pace of the countering trends in reducing energy and material use, in reducing pollutants, and in controlling the unsustainable extraction of land and sea resources. Many of the differences in trends are expressed spatially, with different regions experiencing good or bad news. The trends analyzed can provide a checklist for a continuing assessment of the major forces affecting a sustainability transition. Thus a central task of sustainable development will be to accelerate the trends that favor a transition and slow the trends that impede them. Because sustainable development takes place locally rather than globally, an important task for a place-based sustainability science is to identify the specific trends most relevant to such places and the ways in which local populations can contribute to altering the trends that affect them.

What forces and the processes that underlie these trends are the principal drivers toward or away from sustainability goals and targets? How may favorable forces be accelerated and harmful forces slowed? A set of goals, quantitative targets, and associated indicators that characterize a sustainability transition are analyzed. The project reveals “levers of change,” forces that both control the rate of positive change and are subject to policy intervention, for four goals: reducing hunger, promoting literacy, stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations, and maintaining freshwater availability. Increasing world population makes progress on all four goals more difficult. After accounting for population, the levers of change trends in life-support systems focus on technology. The capital investment time horizon is the limiting factor for decreasing emissions of greenhouse gases. The rate of future water consumption is most likely to be influenced by the rate at which farmers invent and adopt water-efficient agricultural technologies and practices. Changes in consumer preferences can alter future scenarios significantly for the better. The project concludes that a powerful lever of change is the concerted willingness of governments, business, and civil society to press ahead with actions needed to achieve the current 2015 goals of the Millennium Declaration and the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

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For information about related activities, visit the Science, Environment and Development Group web site.
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Last Modified: 25 April 2006 12:33:26 -0400