ABSTRACT

Sustainability Science: Key Issues is a comprehensive textbook for undergraduates, postgraduates, and participants in executive trainings from any disciplinary background studying the theory and practice of sustainability science. Each chapter takes a critical and reflective stance on a key issue or method of sustainability science. Contributing authors offer perspectives from diverse disciplines, including physics, philosophy of science, agronomy, geography, and the learning sciences.

This book equips readers with a better understanding of how one might actively design, engage in, and guide collaborative processes for transforming human-environment-technology interactions, whilst embracing complexity, contingency, uncertainties, and contradictions emerging from diverse values and world views. Each reader of this book will thus have guidance on how to create and/or engage in similar initiatives or courses in their own context.

Sustainability Science: Key Issues is the ideal book for students and researchers engaged in problem and project based learning in sustainability science.

part |52 pages

Introduction

chapter 2|24 pages

Flowers of resistance

Citizen science, ecological democracy and the transgressive education paradigm

part I|113 pages

Embracing complexity and alternative futures

chapter 3|27 pages

Systems approaches for transforming social practice

Design requirements

chapter 7|14 pages

Social technology and Theory U

Co-creating actionable knowledge for leadership

part II|101 pages

What might transformations look like? Sectoral challenges and interdependence

chapter 10|28 pages

Food systems and human ecology

An overview

chapter 11|7 pages

Energy

Physical and technical basics

chapter 14|18 pages

Community-based monitoring for improved water governance

A case study in Holbox Island, Quintana Roo State, Mexico

part III|87 pages

Tracking, steering and judging transformation

chapter 15|25 pages

Sustainability indicators

Quality and quantity

chapter 18|8 pages

Postscript

Heuristics for sustainability science

chapter 19|11 pages

Outlook

Citizens and science in the Anthropocene