This publication presents the proceedings of the OeAW Young Academy's Science Day on
sustainability. Humanity faces a multiple sustainability crisis: global resource consumption
has reached a level transgressing several planetary boundaries (including e.g. climate change
and biodiversity loss) while at the same time major societal challenges prevail including
ending hunger reducing poverty ensuring equal rights and sustaining world peace. Across
disciplines research addresses diverse and interconnected sustainability challenges departing
from diverging starting points and developing a plethora of theoretical and methodological
approaches problem diagnoses and potential solutions. Despite having become a topic of public
interest in recent crucial evidence from sustainability research still does not feed
sufficiently into political and economic decision-making to achieve ecological and societal
sustainability goals. In view of these considerations and as groundwork for advancing its
sustainability agenda the Young Academy solicited positions from its members and selected
guests in order to determine the bandwidth of approaches. Three questions were asked: 1) What
characterizes the current sustainability crisis? 2) How would societies need to change to
attain a transformation toward sustainability? 3) How can research contribute to mastering this
challenge? Thus what you are holding in your hands is a preliminary output of this exchange a
collection of inputs and by no means a treatise on sustainability. If anything it
demonstrates that sustainability can and must be conceived as a multidimensional challenge
affecting ecological socio-economic and cultural processes.
