STATEMENT OF THE FRIIBERGH WORKSHOP ON SUSTAINABILITY SCIENCE
Friibergh, Sweden, 11-14 October 2000

The world’s present development path is not sustainable. Efforts to meet the needs of a growing population in a globalizing, unequal and human-dominated world will continue to exert unsustainable pressures on the Earth’s essential life-support systems.Worrying interactions among climate change, loss of biological diversity, increasing poverty and disease, and growing inequality combine to increase the vulnerability of humans and nature. Meeting fundamental human needs while preserving the life-support systems of Earth will require a worldwide acceleration of today’s halting progress in a transition toward sustainability. A response as to how this transition might be achieved has begun to emerge in recent reports of national and international scientific organizations, as well as from independent networks of activists and scientists.

To take these ideas further, two dozen scientists, drawn from the natural and social sciences and from across the world, convened at Sweden’s Friibergh Manor in October 2000. Participants concluded that promoting the goal of sustainability requires the emergence and conduct of the new field of sustainability science. Sustainability science seeks to improve on the substantial but still limited understanding of nature-society interactions gained in recent decades.This has been achieved through work in the environmental sciences estimating and evaluating human impacts, and evidence from social and development studies that takes into account environmental influences on human well-being.What is urgently needed now is a better general understanding of the complex dynamic interactions between society and nature so that the alarming trend towards increasing vulnerability is reversed.

This will require major advances in our ability to analyze and predict the behavior of complex self-organizing systems, characterize the irreversible impacts of interacting stresses, interpret multiple scales of organization, and assess the roles of various social actors with divergent expectations. Much contemporary experience points to the need to address these issues through integrated scientific efforts focused on the social and ecological characteristics of particular places or regions.The workshop formulated an initial set of core questions that examines the combinational character of nature-society interactions, our ability to guide those interactions along more sustainable trajectories, and ways to promote and implement the social learning that will be essential to the navigation of a transition to sustainability.

By structure, method, and content, sustainability science must differ fundamentally from most science, as we know it. Familiar approaches to developing and testing hypotheses are inadequate because of non-linearity, complexity, and long time lags between actions and their consequences. Additional complications arise from the recognition that humans cannot stand outside the nature-society system.The common sequential analytical phases of scientific inquiry such as conceptualizing the problem, collecting data, developing theories and applying the results will become parallel functions of social learning, which incorporate the elements of action, adaptive management and policy as experiment.

Sustainability science will therefore need to employ new methodologies that generate the semi-quantitative models of qualitative data, build upon lessons from case studies, and extract inverse approaches that work backwards from undesirable consequences to identify pathways that can avoid such outcomes. Scientists and practitioners will need to work together with the public at large to produce trustworthy knowledge and judgment that is scientifically sound and rooted in social understanding.

Furthermore sustainability science will learn to work with all manner of social groups to recognize how they come to gain knowledge, establish certainty of outlooks, and adjust their perceptions as they relate to each other’s needs.This in turn will require sustainability science to sense better how governments are responding, how democracies are improving and how citizens generally act to play out the sustainability transition.

Meeting the challenge of sustainability science will also require new styles of institutional organization to foster and support interdisciplinary research over the long term; to build capacity for such research, especially in developing countries; and to integrate such research in coherent systems of research planning, assessment and decision support. We need to be able to involve scientists, practitioners, and citizens in setting priorities, creating new knowledge, evaluating its possible consequences, and testing it in action.This will require integration of this new active knowledge in particular locations and cultural settings through broader networks of research and monitoring.

In the coming years, the emerging field of sustainability science will need to move forward along several pathways if it is to prove successful. There will be wide discussion within scientific communities, North and South, of the approach, its key questions, methods of inquiry, and institutional needs.There should be an effort to reconnect science to the many political efforts for promoting sustainable development. One benchmark is the forthcoming “Rio + 10” Conference that will review developments in science over the decade since the UN Conference on Environment and Development. And across the continents, in groups small and large, research relating to sustainability science is under way and accelerating. This research can be connected and enhanced, and it can transform itself into the core of an effective new field

Note: Participants at the Workshop were B. Bolin,W. Clark, R. Corell, N. Dickson, S. Faucheux, G. Gallopin, A.Gruebler, M. Hall, B. Huntley, J. Jager, C. Jaeger, N. Jodha, R. Kasperson, R. Kates, I. Lowe, A. Mabogunje, P. Matson, J. McCarthy, H. Mooney, B. Moore, T. O’Riordan, J. Schellnhuber, and U. Svedin. A report on the Workshop, together with updates on a larger follow up meeting to be held a year hence in the Southern Hemisphere, will be posted on http://sustainabilityscience.org/.