At AASHE 2011 last October, Julie Newman (Sustainability Director, Yale University) and Shana Weber (Sustainability Manager, Princeton University) hosted a workshop on “Framing a research agenda for campus sustainability”. For those not able to attend, an attendee did capture a partial transcription of the session here.

The importance of thinking further about the topics raised in that workshop came up recently as I was reading a study from Jasleen Kaur, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory who is also a doctoral student at Indiana University’s School of Informatics. Her research paper, “Evolution and structure of sustainability science” examines the rapidly growing body of research in sustainability science. Her research has shown that the number of authors writing about sustainability has doubled every 8.3 years between 1974 and 2010.

This is quite remarkable and I admit, had me recalling a recent comic about the word “sustainable” becoming "unsustainable".

Returning to Kaur’s research, she also unearthed the academic disciplines most contributing to the research in sustainability science and found that 34 percent of published research is from the social sciences, followed by biology with 23 percent and engineering with 22 percent. The below chart provides a further breakdown of represented academic areas (image courtesy of Indiana University):

A press release from IU regarding the research is available here.
The full paper is available for download here.

Returning for a just a moment to the comic strip referenced above, are two fascinating Google Ngram graphs for the word sustainable. Here is the word “sustainable” since 1800
and since 1960. (For background on how Google’s Ngram viewer works go here.)
As a colleague pointed out, the "since 1800 chart" is strikingly similar to the global warming hockey stick chart that is one of the most assiduously referenced Wikipedia entries of all time. The comic strip hits close to home.

What can we deduce from all of this growth? Some of the conclusions are quite obvious – major scientific and societal challenges facing humans are being rigorously studied. However, like Newman and Weber at AASHE 2011, I’m not convinced there is a unified practice of sustainability research underway (related: has this growth in research resulted in significant societal sustainability performance?).Far too often, the disciplines contributing to this research remain siloed into existing departments and are not adequately engaged in interdisciplinary research.

At the same time, I'm not convinced that the higher ed (HE) sustainability movement needs its own sector-specific sustainability research agenda – many of the challenges institutions face and are overcoming go beyond the confines of the campus and influence (or should) the broader community. Separating the HE sustainability movement from the broader societal sustainability movement is a silo we need to avoid.

Thoughts or observations? Share comments below.

All images courtesy of Indiana University