A new report from the National Research Council of the National Academies, Our Common Journey: A Transition Toward Sustainability, calls for scientific research, private actions, and public policies to be increasingly linked in order to promote a transition to sustainable development, in which people can meet their needs while simultaneously nurturing and restoring the environment. The report argues that societies should approach sustainability not as a destination, but as an ongoing, adaptive learning process. To that end, the report proposes an approach for monitoring progress in the transition to sustainability and a set of institutional reforms to facilitate the needed research, innovation, and social learning. It sets forth a new research agenda for sustainability science.

The report documents large-scale social and environmental change and explores tools for "what if" analysis of possible future developments and their implications for sustainability. It also identifies the greatest threats to sustainability and outlines several priorities for action in five key area aimed at using information that is already known to achieve a successful transition to sustainability.

Priorities for action include:

Population. Achieving a 10 percent reduction in the population of 9 billion now projected for 2050 is a desirable and attainable goal, the report says. Having nearly 1 billion fewer people on the planet would ease the transition toward sustainability. This can be done by meeting the widespread need for contraceptives globally, by helping women to postpone childbearing through education and job opportunities and to reduce family size overall, and by encouraging society to increase the care and education of smaller numbers of children.

Urban systems. It should be possible to accommodate the projected massive growth of urban areas in a habitable, efficient, and environmentally friendly manner. Cities are faced with meeting the needs for housing, nurturing, educating, and employing the 4 billion more people expected to be living in urban areas by 2050, while providing them with adequate water, sanitation, and clean air. These cities should be able to meet human needs and preserve the environment by building modern facilities and developing systems for delivering services more efficiently.

Agricultural production. An achievable goal is to reverse declining trends in agricultural production in Africa while sustaining historic trends elsewhere. The most critical near-term step is to reverse the decline in sub-Saharan Africa, the only region where population growth has outpaced growth in agricultural production. A collaborative effort involving governments, the scientific community, farmers, and nongovernment organizations will be needed in Africa. At the same time, meeting the challenge of feeding the burgeoning world population as a whole and reducing hunger while sustaining life-support systems will require dramatic overall advances in food production, distribution, and access over the next two generations. Sustainable increases in output per hectare of two to three times present levels will be required by 2050. Productivity must be increased on farmlands, reduced on fragile land areas, and restored to degraded terrain.

Energy and materials. Efficiency in energy and materials use, including reductions in the amount of carbon produced by unit of energy and the amount of energy used per unit of product, should be accelerated to at least double the current rate of improvement. Research and development should continue on the many efforts under way to lower household energy use, build low-polluting and energy-efficient automobiles, and reduce waste, as well as to minimize the consumption of energy and materials for industrial processes through reuse, recycling, and the substitution of services for products.

Living resources. Many ecosystems are being degraded by the demands and stresses of human use. The goal should be to work toward restoring and maintaining their function and integrity so that their services and human uses can be sustained over the long term. Greater understanding is needed of how biological systems work, how to stem the continued loss of habitats, and how ecosystems can be restored and managed at the local or regional scale. This will require knowledge of the socioeconomic aspects of over exploitation, the appropriate valuation of ecosystem services, and sustainable management and harvesting techniques. Ecosystems still not degraded by human activities represent the last reserves of the Earth's biodiversity. For these systems the goal should be to protect and conserve biological diversity, both by dramatically reducing current rates of land conversion and by planning for conservation.

Copies of Our Common Journey: A Transition Toward Sustainability are available from the National Academy Press; tel. (202) 334-3313 or 1-800-624-6242. The cost of the report is $49.95 (prepaid) plus shipping charges of $4.50 for the first copy and $.95 for each additional copy.