Abstract

In a curious paradox, sustainability is both shunned and sought after in a nation struggling to find its identity in this troubling period of coming to grips with austerity. On the one hand the cal is for “re-growth” with all the anticipated trappings of investment and employment. On the other there is growing concern over the unemployability of an increasing number of young people in the UK (even worse in southern Europe) with a real prospect of persistent declining standards of living for all but the very rich and comfortable. Into this mix comes a new push for a science for sustainable development which is geared to compassion, fairness, empathy, and social justice. In its wake is a call for wellbeing and betterment being the hallmarks of social economy and for more community based localism with considerable changes to the geography of governance. Part of this expression is the emergence of Future Earth as a fresh science for sustainable development and for the encompassing of whole campuses with moves to employability and to future skills training and forms of learning which capture this emerging form of knowledge sharing.

Tim O’Riordan is an Emeritus Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. He is leading the contribution by the British Academy to the creation of Future Earth in the UK and is active in working with many others to create landscape wide water stewardship for the east and south of England. He has also completed extensive research on adaptation to the changing coasts of North Norfolk and Portugal. He is working with colleagues in the University of East Anglia on the same mission as colleagues in ARU on the widening of the Future Earth mission across the whole campus