Building strategic interdisciplinary partnerships among natural and social scientists and practitioners to foster sustainability in a rapidly changing world

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The Ecological Society of America (ESA) will hold an interdisciplinary workshop to engage many disciplines and types of practitioners to co-design the scientific framework for Earth Stewardship, an effort to engage scientific knowledge in societal decision making about sustainable futures. ESA has hosted four meetings involving academics and practitioners in social, psychological and physical sciences, religion and ethics, urban design and regional planning, and civil engineering. These exploratory meetings revealed a widespread professional concern with stewardship of the Earth?s life support and socio-ecological systems. This award will support a workshop to leverage efforts in Earth stewardship. The objectives are to bring together academics within the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities along with practitioners in planning, design, engineering, government and civil society to develop a strategic plan for Earth stewardship and develop a strategy for learning, communicating and teaching about Earth stewardship. This effort is designed to complement the emerging science of sustainability by facilitating substantive intellectual exchange among disciplines concerned with the scholarship supporting stewardship.Many current efforts are aimed at applying scientific principles to solving problems of sustainability. The focus of this workshop is on stewardship, rather than on applying basic knowledge. Such stewardship is especially crucial with mounting global changes in the form of urbanization, human migration, population growth, global eutrophication and toxification, land use conversion on continental scales, and economic and resource dependency that cross international borders. The knowledge shared and pilot projects to be identified at the workshop will contribute to science, education, and the civic dialogue in ways that can shape more sustainable trajectories in an uncertain world.