ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how computation can support individuals, groups, and societies in living sustainably. By sustainability, we refer primarily to the Earth’s capacity to support human, animal, and plant life while sustaining our planet’s existing climate and biodiversity. We argue that measuring a system’s sustainability by characterizing status quo, quantifying the effects of an intervention, and comparing decision alternatives will lead to greater overall sustainability. The chapter rst discusses why it is difcult to obtain measures about sustainability. On the one hand, sustainability is a complex issue, drawing on multiple disciplines. On the other hand, sustainability may be described at varying levels of scale, each with a very large number of variables, assumptions, and interactions. Next we turn to computation and discuss its use in analyzing sensed data and simulating sustainability.
