Showcasing advances and building community in modeling for sustainability

We organized this Special Feature on “Modeling Dynamic Systems for Sustainable Development” to showcase the field’s recent advances. Much recent research in sustainability science has mobilized data and theory to better understand systems that include interacting people, technologies, institutions, ecosystems, and both social and environmental processes. A recent National Academies workshop and an Annual Review paper identified several challenges and open questions for the field, stressing the importance of developing and testing new theories to advance knowledge and guide action (1, 2). However, there has been less attention in sustainability science toward integrating modeling with theory and data-focused approaches. Modeling is necessary for making projections about the dynamical implications of our present understanding of nature-society systems—which is essential to determine whether long-term trends in nature-society interactions are consistent with sustainable development goals and to analyze whether particular interventions (e.g., technologies, policies, behavior) are likely to change those interactions in ways that promote such goals.