Abstract:The 2001 Summer Study of the Research and Assessment Systems for Sustainability Program was a working session to advance the intellectual agenda of science and technology for sustainability. Discussion focused primarily on issues of vulnerability and resilience, as they provide an exceptionally rich "case study" for exploring the conceptual and design challenges facing efforts to build place-based, integrative systems of research, assessment and decision support that can more effectively address problems arising through the interactions of society and environment. The particular objective of the Summer Study was to make significant progress in addressing the following four related groups of questions: what is the Research and Assessment Systems for Sustainability Program's model of vulnerability/resilience for coupled human-environment systems; how can this model be refined, tested, and applied; how can integrated systems of research, assessment and decision support be designed to enable such work; and what methodological and modeling innovations are needed to facilitate the analysis of such systems and to advance understanding of the nonlinear, multi-scale, rapidly evolving relationships between nature and society that are the focus of sustainability science? This paper reports on the discussion at the Summer Study on these four core sets of questions. |