Sustainability Science

Fair allocation of diminishing natural resources is increasingly central to sustainability. This includes the allocation of costs related to providing access, such as dams, pipes and pumps delivering clean water. Water tariffs are often designed to both recover these costs, meet social needs of water services to the poor, and incentivise conservation in dry times. However, strained public finances, prolonged droughts and economic inequality can undermine these goals and force prioritisations that many see as unfair. This happened in Cape Town, South Africa, during its 2015–2018 water crisis. This study investigates what residents in three different socioeconomic contexts view as fair water tariffs 1 year after the crisis. Using Q method, we describe five distinct perspectives on fairness: ‘the Insurer’, ‘the Individualist’, ’the Bureaucrat’, ‘the Humanitarian’, and ‘the Prepper’. These, we argue, can help distinguish between different ideas of what fairness implies, and what is required to promote it. We exemplify this by examining how viewpoints might have been shaped by specific communities’ experiences during and after the apartheid state’s discriminatory segregation policies. Using distributive, procedural and interactional interpretations of fairness, we discuss how the complex layers of poverty, inequality, mistrust, privilege and discrimination might produce different experiences and ideas of who should pay for and benefit from water services. Using these insights, we also reflect on the merits of tariffs that emphasise cost recovery and resource conservation over social needs, and the risks this poses for growing informal settlements in climate-stressed cities of the global South. Using Q method, we identified five distinct perspectives with different views on what constitutes a fair water tariff.

Sustainability of livestock farming is not only part of intensive public debate, but also refers to a multi-stakeholder field comprising many different interests and worldviews. Beyond the environmental, economic and social dimensions of livestock farming, especially animal welfare should be considered as an essential aspect of sustainability. Such sustainability issues may be successfully addressed by transdisciplinary research. Science–industry collaborations in the realm of livestock sciences do have the potential for becoming successful transdisciplinary projects if project partners are aware of the challenges and limitations. In the light of this situation the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna and an Austrian food retailer launched a collaborative research project. The main objective of the project was to develop measures to improve sustainability of current pig fattening systems with a special focus on animal welfare. These measures were subsequently implemented on three pig fattening farms in Austria and the effects on animal welfare, economic and environmental performance as well as the farmers’ perception were evaluated. In this paper, the research process will be analysed from a transdisciplinary perspective, identifying differences between transdisciplinarity and different forms of applied research. This is followed by a discussion of challenges and failures as well as opportunities and achievements of the project concluding with a presentation of recommendations for further research projects. Finally, it is discussed to which extent industry-funded research offers suitable conditions for transdisciplinary research projects in pork production using the present project as a case study.

Based on the study of nine atolls of the Tuamotu Archipelago, French Polynesia, this article assesses the anthropogenic disturbances that disrupt atoll island natural dynamics and thereby undermine the ability of these islands to naturally adjust to climate-related pressures. It more specifically investigates to what extent the existing legal framework limits these disturbances. The results show that 20 types of human disturbances occurring in the intertidal, coastal and inland areas contribute to island destabilisation. Land reclamation, sediment extraction from coastal and intertidal areas, coastal developments and engineered protection structures are the main disturbances observed. These disturbances are increasingly occurring on both urban and rural islands. We found that law has failed in regulating these disturbances for various reasons, related to both the content of law (including legal gaps and the lack of atoll-specific legal provisions) and the failure of its implementation, which reflects governance issues. In this context, taking control of human disturbances requires not only strengthening and updating existing legal tools, but also and most importantly creating the enabling conditions for law to be effective, especially through the strengthening of institutions’ capacities and public involvement. Additionally, promoting alternatives to locally carried out sediment mining and encouraging the construction of raised houses would help taking control of human-induced island destabilisation.

The transdisciplinary research mode has gained prominence in the research on and for sustainability transformations. Yet, solution-oriented research addressing complex sustainability problems has become complex itself, with new transdisciplinary research formats being developed and tested for this purpose. Application of new formats offers learning potentials from experience. To this end, we accompanied fourteen research projects conceptualized as real-world labs (RwLs) from 2015 to 2018. RwLs were part of a funding program on ‘Science for Sustainability’ in the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg. Here, we combine conceptual and empirical work to a structured collection of experiences and provide a comprehensive account of RwLs. First, we outline characteristics of RwLs as transformation oriented, transdisciplinary research approach, using experiments, enabling learning and having a long-term orientation. Second, we outline eleven success factors and concrete design notes we gained through a survey of the 14 RwLs: (1) find the right balance between scientific and societal aims, (2) address the practitioners needs and restrictions, (3) make use of the experimentation concept, (4) actively communicate, (5) develop a ‘collaboration culture’, (6) be attached to concrete sites, (7) create lasting impact and transferability, (8) plan for sufficient time and financial means, (9) adaptability, (10) research-based learning, and (11) recognize dependency on external actors. Characteristics and success factors are combined to illustrate practical challenges in RwLs. Third, we show which methods could be used to cope with challenges in RwLs. We conclude discussing the state of debate on RwLs and outline future avenues of research.

Community currencies (CCs) are alternative forms of money usually issued and managed by citizens, NGOs and companies as well as local public administrations. Used to trade goods and services in limited territories or among a certain community, CCs are composed of symbolic, cultural, and social dimensions and fully immersed in particular economic and institutional contexts. Despite the increasing adoption of CCs, the discussion on guiding principles and values to address their purposes, particularly in relation to environmental sustainability issues is still scarce in the literature. Given this gap, this paper relies on the following research question: what are the design principles to be considered for community currency projects oriented to sustainable development goals? We follow the design science research paradigms to describe the design principles of a CC project. We analyze the institutional and economic context in which they are implemented, the goals for what they were created, the processes and mechanisms to rely upon their operation, and how they are evaluated according to their specific goals and to their implications to the sustainable development goals. It is important to emphasize that in this article we focus on improving the understanding of CC projects and what should be considered in their evaluation, however not to the extent on how they should be implemented. The design principles framework presented in this paper specifies guidelines to discuss principles to be considered within a range of different possibilities of diversified CC implementation strategies.

To tackle complex sustainability problems, science and practice must join forces and interact in the processes of knowledge co-production. This central claim of sustainability science requires all actors to do more than simply participate in a workshop or carry out traditional research. It is essential to provide clarity to actors about the roles to adopt in these processes, especially in terms of planning collaborations—with whom, when, and how. Therefore, in this paper we identify, describe, and discuss 15 roles for actors involved in such processes. We undertook a systematic literature review to identify papers with precise descriptions of transdisciplinary (td) and transformative (tf) research processes. We focused on the common occurrence of activities undertaken by actors by applying 72 activity codes a total of 549 times. Subclusters of activities were identified by means of a hierarchical cluster analysis and these were condensed into 15 roles. The roles can be categorised in four activity realms: field, academia, boundary management, and knowledge co-production. The roles of the Data Supplier, the Field Expert, and the Application Expert are adopted by actors who originate from the field, whereas the roles of the Scientific Analyst and the Knowledge Collector are primarily adopted by researchers. Furthermore, we identified 10 roles within the activity realms of the knowledge co-production process and boundary management. The high number and diversity of roles, especially in the realm of boundary management, reveals the importance of a comprehensive approach to coordination, communication, and process design.

International environmental policy has failed to reverse climate change, resource depletion and the generalized decline of biodiversity and ecological life support systems. This paper traces economic roots of current environmental problems and examines the evolution of sustainability policy since the publication of Club of Rome’s report Limits to growth and the celebration of the first Earth summit in Stockholm in 1972 to the publication of UNEP’s Green economy report and the celebration of the last Earth summit in Rio 2012. Our emphasis is on the evolving framing of the relations between growth and the environment and the role of markets and states in the sustainability policy agenda. We review influential policy documents and Earth summit declarations since the early 1970s. Three major changes are identified in international sustainability discourse: (1) an analytical shift from a notion of growth versus the environment to a notion of growth for the environment, (2) a shift in focus from direct public regulation to market-based instruments, and (3) a shift from a political to a technocratic discourse. We note that attempts in sustainability policy to address the conflict between growth and the environment have pulled back severely since the 1970s and discuss the observed patterns of change in relation to changes in the balance of political and ideological forces. We conclude summarizing main insights from the review and discussing perspectives of the sustainability debate on growth and the environment.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) suffer from a lack of national data needed for effective monitoring and implementation. Almost half of the SDG indicators are not regularly produced, and available datasets are often out-of-date. New monitoring approaches using big data are advancing rapidly and can complement official statistics to help fill critical data gaps. However, there is poor information-sharing on the latest innovations and research collaborations across different thematic areas, and limited evaluation of strengths and weaknesses for supporting national monitoring. This paper provides a systematic review of the academic literature over the past 5 years relating to the use of big data to support monitoring of the SDGs. It reviews the state-of-the-art research using big data and advanced analytics to produce new datasets, the alignment of these datasets with the official SDG indicators, the main types and sources of big data used, and the analytical methods applied. We developed a set of evaluation criteria and applied it to highlight some of the strengths and limitations of these datasets derived from big data. We find that recent research has developed a considerable range of new datasets that could contribute to monitoring 15 goals, 51 targets, and 69 indicators. Dominant focal areas of research include land and biodiversity, health, water, cities and settlements, and poverty. Satellite and Earth Observation data were the primary sources used, most commonly applied with machine learning methods and cloud computing. However, several challenges remain, including ensuring the relevance of new datasets for monitoring SDG indicators, cost and accessibility considerations, sustainability aspects, and linking global datasets to nationally owned monitoring processes.

Vineyard landscapes significantly contribute to the economy, identity, culture, and biodiversity of many regions worldwide. Climate change, however, is increasingly threatening the resilience of vineyard landscapes and of their ecological conditions, undermining the provision of multiple ecosystem services. Previous research has often focused on climate change impacts, ecosystem conditions and ecosystem services without systematically reviewing how they have been studied in the literature on viticulture. Here, we systematically review the literature on vineyard landscapes to identify how ecosystem conditions and services have been investigated, and whether an integrative approach to investigate the effects of climate change was adopted. Our results indicate that there are still very few studies that explicitly address multiple ecosystem conditions and services together. Only 28 and 18% of the reviewed studies considered more than two ecosystem conditions or services, respectively. Moreover, while more than 97% of the relationships between ecosystem conditions and services studied were addressing provisioning and regulating services, only 3% examined cultural services. Finally, this review found that there is a lack of integrative studies that address simultaneously the relationships between ecosystem condition, ecosystem services and climate change (only 15 out of 112 studies). To overcome these gaps and to better understand the functioning of vineyard socio-ecological systems under climate change, multidisciplinary, integrative, and comprehensive approaches should be adopted by future studies. A holistic understanding of vineyard landscapes will indeed be crucial to support researchers and decision makers in developing sustainable adaptation strategies that enhance the ecological condition of vineyards and ensure the provision of multiple ecosystem services under future climate scenarios.