Sustainability Science: Key Issues

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. Introduction Chapter 1. Sustainability science as a transformative social learning process Ariane König Chapter 2. Flowers of resistance: Citizen science, ecological democracy and the transgressive education paradigm Arjen E.J. Wals, Michael A. Peters Part I. Embracing complexity and alternative futures: Conceptual tools and methods Chapter 3. Systems approaches for transforming social practice: Design requirements Ariane König Chapter 4. Cognitive pitfalls in dealing with sustainability Philipp Sonnleitner Chapter 5. Escaping the complexity dilemma Barry Newell, Katrina Proust Chapter 6. Exploring alternative futures with scenarios Gerard Drenth, Shirin Elahi, Ariane König Chapter 7. Social technology and Theory U: Co-creating actionable knowledge for leadership Isabel Page Chapter 8. Staging design-thinking for sustainability in practice: Guidance and watch-outs Kilian Gericke, Boris Eisenbart, Gregor Waltersdorfer Part II. What might transformations look like? Sectoral challenges and interdependence Chapter 9. Can ecosystem services help the new agricultural transitions? Nicolas Dendoncker, Emilie Crouzat Chapter 10. Food systems and human ecology: An overview Federico Davila, Robert Dyball Chapter 11. Energy: Physical and technical basics Susanne Siebentritt Chapter 12. Urban energy transitions from innovations in green building Julia Affolderbach, Bérénice Preller, Christian S