We define sustainability expansively.  What does economics teach us about inclusive growth, equality of opportunity, minimizing negative externalities, and the costs of low growth for job creation and skill acquisition?  How can countries, individually and collectively, leverage ecological sciences and engineering to scale energy sources that are both sustainable and practical, encourage environmentally sound consumption patterns, promote resource renewal and protect biodiversity?  What would sustainable global integration look like, and how would countries get there?  How is understanding the behavior of complex systems crucial to sustainability?  How can architecture and engineering build residences, workplaces, cities, and exurbs in smarter ways?  What can countries learn from sociology about supporting family structures, kin networks, and community institutions?  How might information science and technology render virtual public spheres civil while keeping them open, and promote a sense of shared truth?  How do changes in environmental quality and access to vaccines affect those that bear the heaviest burden of pollution and disease? How can societies use political science to improve governance, raise political participation, and manage a wide diversity of views that healthy societies must have?  Above all, how can countries create and propagate consensus narratives of sustainability that balance interests?

Elke U. Weber
Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment
Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, Princeton University

Dimitri Courant
Post-doctoral Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School

Nithya Joseph
Postdoctoral research fellow at French Institute of Pondicherry, Pondicherry, India

Tania Sharmin
Senior lecturer in sustainable environmental design in architecture at Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, U.K.

Veda Vaidyanathan
Visiting associate fellow, Institute of Chinese Studies (ICS) in New Delhi and associate at Harvard University Asia Center

Kuansong Victor Zhuang
International postdoctoral scholar at Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore