About INSS

International Network for Sustainability Science (INSS) endeavors to be a platform for sharing knowledge on present status and approaches for sustainable development, and for linking academic institutions.

In addressing the questions of sustainability for the global environment and world community, a great deal of research has been conducted on such a wide range of issues as the global climate, energy, food and water security in terms of both quality and quantity, appropriate land use, resilience of society including ecosystem services, and poverty. Each of them, however, has been taken up separately to date.

Research efforts have been focused on analyzing each issue separately to develop visions and scenarios distinct to each problem that hinders sustainability. Recently, it has become increasingly clear that it is of critical importance to synthesize these separate streams of research efforts into a coherent one, as witnessed by the recent debate surrounding the pros and cons with regard to biofuels, for example. Such problems arise owing to the complexity of sustainability, precisely because the streams of sustainability research efforts have been viewed separately, without sufficient consideration of the complex interactions among them.

To prevent unintended consequences, it is vital that we develop a new academic inquiry of sustainability science that is interdisciplinary and adopts a holistic approach in order to identify problems and perspectives involving the sustainability of all aspects and in all regions of the world. With this as a background, sustainability science has emerged as a rapidly growing field of inquiry.