Framing Sustainability Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Sustainability science was codified as a multidisciplinary academic field between 2000 and 2009 with the creation of a journal called Sustainability Science, a study section within the US National Academy of Sciences and the Forum on Science and Innovation for Sustainable Development, which links various sustainability efforts and individuals around the world. Sustainability science aims to bring scientific and technical knowledge to bear on problems of sustainability, including assessing the resilience of ecosystems, informing policy on poverty alleviation, and inventing technologies to sequester CO₂ and purify drinking water. William C. Clark, associate editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, writes, "Like 'agricultural science' and 'health science,' sustainability science is a field defined by the problems it addresses rather than by the disciplines it employs. In particular, the field seeks to facilitate what the National Research Council has called a 'transition toward sustainability,' improving society's capacity to use the earth in ways that simultaneously 'meet the needs of a much larger but stabilizing human population…sustain the life support systems of the planet, and…substantially reduce hunger and poverty'".

Like ecological economics, sustainability science seeks to overcome the splintering of knowledge and perspectives by emphasizing a transdisciplinary, systems-level approach to sustainability. In contrast to ecological economics, sustainability science often brings together researchers from a broader base and focuses on devising practical solutions. Clark calls it the "use-inspired research" typified by Louis Pasteur.

Sustainability science arose largely in response to the increasing call for sustainable development in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The core question became how? The number of scholarly articles on sustainability science increased throughout the 1990s. In 1999, the National Research Council published Our Common Journey: A Transition Toward Sustainability. The report investigated how science could assist "the reconciliation of society's development goals with the planet's environmental limits over the long term". It set three main goals for sustainability science research: "Develop a research framework that integrates global and local perspectives to shape a 'place-based' understanding of the interactions between environment and society... Initiate focused research programs on a small set of understudied questions that are central to a deeper understanding of interactions between society and the environment... Promote better utilization of existing tools and processes for linking knowledge to action in pursuit of a transition to sustainability".

Shortly thereafter, an article in Science attempted to define the core questions of sustainability science, again focusing on themes of integrating research, policy, and practical action across a variety of geographic and temporal scales.

At about the same time, groups such as the Alliance for Global Sustainability (AGS) formed. AGS is an academic collaboration among the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Tokyo, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. The alliance seeks to inject scientific information into largely political debates on sustainability. Members of the alliance also created the journal Sustainability Science. Writing in the inaugural edition, Hiroshi Komiyama and Kazuhiko Takeuchi described sustainability science as broadly addressing three levels of analysis and their interactions: (1) global, primarily the natural environment and its life-support systems; (2) social, primarily comprising human institutions and collective activities; and (3) human, largely addressing questions of individual health, happiness, and prosperity.