Muneepeerakul, R.,Castillo-Chavez, C.
Introduction: The report Toward a Science of Sustainability (Clark and Levin 2010) states that “Building a science of sustainability...requires a truly multi-disciplinary approach that integrates practical experience with knowledge and know-how drawn from across the natural and social sciences, medicine and engineering, and mathematics and computation.” This National Science Foundation (NSF) report was carried out with the full support of practically all Directorates at the Foundation, a fact that highlights the importance of the challenges and opportunities posed by sustainability science. This is a view that we wholeheartedly share. It is oftentimes too easy to talk about sustainability rhetorically, however. And that will never get us to where we need to be—where we can do something meaningful about it. Take global climate change, for example: despite the vast body of scientific knowledge on the subject, every step of progress has struggled.