Dear Colleagues,

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, 2015) are well defined Global Goals, but can targets be appropriately assessed? and, if so, over which time intervals and spatial scales? The main aim in this Special Issue of Sustainability is to explore the use of retrospective research approaches to understand historical forms of environmental and socioecological sustainability at local, regional or global scales. We encourage the submission of research with novel contributions to theoretical, empirical, and modelling (conceptual and numerical) developments as well as new case studies at local-to-global spatial scales and geologic to historical and contemporary temporal scales. We invite research from several disciplines writing for multidisciplinary audiences, including archaeology, anthropology, ecology, ethnography, environmental history, historical economics, land use and land cover change science, palaeoenvironmental research and sustainable development policy support. We encourage contributions toward developing metrics for summarising, communicating and comparing sustainability in retrospective data; techniques for combining qualitative insights and quantitative data; and bridging the knowledge producer and knowledge end user gaps for complex data. This includes generating scientific knowledge syntheses and communicating the knowledge requirements for robust support of evidence-based policy formulation. We welcome research that creates general knowledge syntheses for specific case studies that summarise data and insights for sustainability-related dialogues. Contributions from non-academic stakeholders with viewpoints and perspectives on knowledge production and partnership deficits are especially of interest to resolve mismatches in research efforts and communication.

This special issue emerged from the International Association for Landscape Ecology (IALE) 10th world congress in 2019, Milano, Italy

Dr. Colin Courtney Mustaphi
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• climate change
• ecosystem degredation
• environemntal change
• evidence-based policy
• knowledge syntheses
• knowledge-practice gap
• land management
• policy support
• past-present-future nexus
• qualitative-quantitative data integration
• resilience
• resource management
• socio-ecological systems
• sustainable environmental policy support
• water management