Science and Policy for Sustainable Development

Environment has always addressed interactions between human activities and the natural world. This year, we formalize and intensify that focus with a new mission statement:

Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development analyzes the problems, places, and people where environment and development come together, illuminating concerns from the local to the global. Environment offers peer-reviewed articles and commentaries from researchers and practitioners who provide a broad range of international perspectives. The magazine also features in-depth reviews of major policy reports, sustainable development indicators, and guides to the best Web sites and publications. Environment is more readable than specialized journals and more timely than textbooks.

We recognize that the concept of sustainable development carries many meanings and attracts many reactions. But this much seems clear: Over the last two decades, the idea of sustainable development has provided space for an amazingly diverse set of interest groups and institutions from around the world that have projected upon it their own fears, hopes, and aspirations for a better life. Common to these many interpretations have been concerns for environment and well-being, present and future, as captured by the Brundtland Commission's creatively ambiguous definition of sustainable development as the ability of humankind "... to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." This original conception has been increasingly linked with concerns for justice and equity, thus creating the modern view of "the interdependent and mutually reinforcing pillars of sustainable development--economic development, social development and environmental protection" articulated at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002.

In the years ahead, Environment intends to constitute a forum for informed discussion of these diverse views of sustainability by soliciting articles that focus on the interactions between environment and development. As always, we will endeavor to bring our readers authoritative and timely appraisals of what science--natural, social, and interdisciplinary--has to say about the nature of those interactions, as well as carefully documented analyses of policy experience in managing them. We also intend to retain our sense of place, seeking to link broad trends of global change with issues of local identity and responsiveness. We will continue to emphasize the great resource themes that lie at the core of global efforts to achieve more sustainable development: water, energy, health, agriculture, and biodiversity. We will publish articles that embed these global themes in the context of continent and locality and in evolving patterns of governance.

Finally, we renew our long-standing commitment to bridging the gap that so often separates those committed to rigorous science from those committed to democratic governance. While occasional conflicts between seekers of truth and seekers of justice may be inevitable, the potential synergies between proponents of these two great human aspirations are even greater. The time is ripe to realize that potential more fully and effectively. Decisionmakers at all levels of government are more aggressively courting scientific advice than at any time in the last quarter century. At the same time, sustainability science--science inspired by and focused on the challenges of environment and development--is coming of age, forging exciting partnerships with government organizations, private sector, and civil society. Environment will therefore seek to promote and facilitate dialogues among the increasing numbers of scientists, politicians, corporate employees, and civic activists around the world who are committed to sustainable development.