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Bridging barriers to advance global sustainability

Nature Sustainability volume 1, pages 324–326 (2018)Cite this article

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Academic enterprises seeking to support society’s efforts to achieve global sustainability need to change their legacy reward systems. We need new structures to foster knowledge that is deeply integrated across disciplines and co-produced with non-academic stakeholders.

Across the world, universities, research organizations, funding agencies, professional societies and national academies, alike, are striving to contribute to the knowledge needed to solve the wicked problems of sustainability. Through the lens of sustainability research, many academic institutions aspire to advance solutions to climate change, land degradation, water scarcity, collapsing ecosystems, expanding urban slums and other global crises that threaten the well-being and future of our communities from local to planetary scales.

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Acknowledgements

The development of this opinion arose from discussions held during the International Forum on ‘Re-thinking interdisciplinary research for global sustainability’ organized by Nature Sustainability and Tsinghua University from 14 to 16 January 2018, in Beijing, China. The authors thank the organizers of the workshop and fellow participants for lively discussions on the nature and role of sustainability research. Any opinions, findings and conclusions expressed in this opinion piece are those of the authors and not meant to represent the views of any supporting institution.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Elena G. Irwin

  2. Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Patricia J. Culligan

  3. Institute for Social Ecology, University for Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria

    Marina Fischer-Kowalski

  4. Sea Education Association, Falmouth, MA, USA

    Kara Lavender Law

  5. ESSIC-AOSC, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Raghu Murtugudde

  6. Environmental Science Department, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Stephanie Pfirman

  7. Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Stephanie Pfirman

Authors
  1. Elena G. Irwin
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  2. Patricia J. Culligan
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  3. Marina Fischer-Kowalski
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  4. Kara Lavender Law
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  5. Raghu Murtugudde
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  6. Stephanie Pfirman
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Elena G. Irwin or Patricia J. Culligan.

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Irwin, E.G., Culligan, P.J., Fischer-Kowalski, M. et al. Bridging barriers to advance global sustainability. Nat Sustain 1, 324–326 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0085-1

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