Sustainable Futures

Dear Colleagues,

The purpose of this special issue is to explore sustainability from a futures perspective. Useful futures analyses do not attempt to predict the future. Instead, good futures analyses work to imagine, describe, and/or create possible futures in such ways as to identify issues of concern for today’s researchers and decision makers. The papers in this special issue should address these types of questions related to improving our understanding of future trends and issues that may impact sustainability:

What sustainability issues will become more serious in the next several decades? Which will become less serious? What progress can be made towards achieving sustainability in the next fifteen to twenty years?

• What are the prospects for being able to better measure progress towards sustainability, from the local to global levels? What are the prospects for synthesizing data across geographic and time scales to better measure sustainability? What are the prospects for synthesizing knowledge across disciplines to enrich our concepts of sustainability?
• Are there any population and/or development trends or prospects that may be positively impacting ecological sustainability? For example, are there any trends in urban design that integrate ecological principles which could help species adapt to climate change?
• Are there trends in politics, economics, and culture that may play out over the next twenty or more years consistent with achieving sustainability goals, or inconsistent? How are communities around the world innovatively addressing futures and sustainability?
• Are there any potential breakthrough technologies on the horizon that could make achieving sustainability easier or even more difficult? What are the potential relationships between sustainability and synthetic biology? For example, what are the pros and cons of the future contributions of synthetic biology to conservation ecology?
• Are there sustainability challenges in the deep future, centuries or longer from now, that are qualitatively different from those being addressed today which require the attention of today’s generation? If so, what are they and how should they be addressed?

Dr. Bruce E. Tonn
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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