International Sustainability Conference 2012

We scarcely need more evidence in support of the claim that sustainable development is one of the major challenges for human societies in the 21st century. Global warming, growing scarcity of non-renewable energy resources, loss of biodiversity, water supply shortages, the long-term degradation of ecosystems, dwindling social cohesion, decreasing social mobility, abating democratic structures, increasingly standardised knowledge concepts and media landscapes, overstrained education systems as well as the health and poverty problems associated with these issues represent the most important growing risks for human societies and their economies. In view of such developments, sciences in the field of sustainability are expected ? in addition to the traditional scientific tasks of understanding and explaining the situation in question ? to contribute analytically to the process of moving societies towards sustainable development, i.e. to produce knowledge for action. Following the outstandi