Abstract
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Sustainability is concerned with meeting the essential needs of the large numbers of people on this planet whose needs are not being met.
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The novel insight provided by the concept of sustainability is that humans and their local and global environments exist as complex social-ecological systems.
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Sustainability science is a new field of research that deals with the interactions between natural and social systems and with how those interactions affect the challenges of sustainability.
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In sustainability science, human/nonhuman and basic/applied dichotomies are abandoned for a new way of viewing the natural world – one in which human demands on global ecosystems is integrated into the capacity of those ecosystems to persist.
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Developing the science of sustainability forces a deep questioning of what the appropriate role of science in society is.
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The focus of sustainability science and most modern socio-ecological studies is to work for improvements in human health, ecosystem health, societal health, and economic health.
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One of the best examples of how the new conceptual model of sustainability science has been put into practice is in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. This is a paradigmatic example of how sustainability science, working at scales from local to global and studying processes occurring from short to long time scales, fully integrates existing knowledge into a framework useful for supporting sustainability.
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All systems consist of three component categories: parts, interconnections, and functions. The concept of sustainability as operationalized in sustainability science reminds us to have a conversation: How should the current social-ecological system be replaced with one that has, as its purpose, human well-being? Further, sustainability reminds us that there is no human well-being that is separate from the well-being of the social-ecological system as a whole.
Keywords
- Ecosystem Service
- Sustainability Science
- Complex Adaptive System
- Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
- Life Support System
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Hamilton, J.G. (2014). Plant Ecology and Sustainability Science. In: Monson, R. (eds) Ecology and the Environment. The Plant Sciences, vol 8. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7501-9_18
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