Special Issue Global Sustainability

Background

Within the global sustainability research landscape, the research programs and networks under Future Earth have emerged to advance and answer basic scientific questions regarding global environmental change, as well as develop ways to integrate natural and social sciences, and strengthen the science-policy interface through transdisciplinary approaches. In short, the focus of Future Earth, drawing on decades of research, has sharpened to accelerate transformations to global sustainability through research and innovation. These scientific advances are in a crucial position to support emerging high level policy fora and processes.

The emerging and pressing scientific questions addressed under Future Earth and other networks are discussed in many forums but they are rarely brought together. This Special Issue in Global Sustainability draws on research and key insights from the Future Earth community, highlighting the key scientific questions emerging from Future Earth’s Global Research Networks (GRNs) and from other organizations addressing compatible challenges.

About the call

The age of the Anthropocene places societies in a position where urgent changes are required. Scientific concerns range from developing improved monitoring of biogeochemical cycles and their feedback across biophysical systems to ways of connecting them to modeling and data analysis. Pressing questions also center around different governance systems and their effectiveness and legitimacy in the light of necessary societal transformations. Increasingly, efforts are focused on connecting the biophysical and the social with interdisciplinary approaches, and it is within these efforts that this Special Issue at Global Sustainability seeks to explore opportunities, as well as tensions for future research in this coming decade. This includes cross-cutting questions regarding new methods of data collection and analysis critical to understanding socio-economic and environmental dynamics and interactions. This Special Issue presents state of the art knowledge and a forward-looking view on the most pressing research questions for the next decade of Future Earth.

We welcome contributions that:

• Provide a touchstone outlining the state-of-the-art for diverse sustainability-related fields;
• Address questions related to transdisciplinary approaches and methods that connect scientific inquiry with the concerns of stakeholders, and for making the science-policy interface more robust;
• Investigates cultural, historical, and developmental tensions that emerge in diverse contexts and are intrinsic to challenges of long-term sustainability and reducing inequality;
• Provide important insights into how and why multi-actor processes fail or succeed, and to point out what steps can be taken to facilitate these further now and in the future; or
• Generate integrated knowledge for successful transformations towards good and fair societies within a stable and resilient Earth system.

The manuscripts are envisioned to be forward-looking in their approach to identifying crucial research questions, across different societal and academic sectors, and across the natural, social, and human sciences, while basing their papers’ existing contributions within any of the Future Earth GRNs and beyond.

All manuscripts will be subjected to and have to pass the peer review process of Global Sustainability as per any normal publication.

When you submit your paper or briefing, please do so via the journal’s ScholarOne site, and select ‘Charting the course for the next decade of Sustainability Research and Innovation’ collection from the list of dropdown options. Please also indicate in the cover letter that your submission is in response to this Call for Papers on ‘Charting the course for the next decade of Sustainability Research and Innovation’.

Full paper submissions to the collection are open between 1 November 2022 – 14 July 2023. Publications will be in summer/early fall 2023.

You can also find the open call on the Cambridge website.

Guest Editors

• Sirkku Juhola, Future Earth Emergent Risks and Extreme Events Global Research Network; University of Helsinki, FI;
• Steven McGreevy, Future Earth Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production Global Research Network; University of Twente, NL;
• Faten Attig-Bahar, University of Carthage; Tunisia Polytechnic School; Food Water Energy Nexus Knowledge-Action Network, TN;
• Giles B. Sioen, Future Earth Global Secretariat; National Institute for Environmental Studies, JP; and
• Judit Ungvari, Future Earth Global Secretariat; George Mason University, US.