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Advancing computational sustainability in higher education

Nature Computational Science volume 4, pages 382–383 (2024)Cite this article

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In 1987, the United Nations (UN) Brundtland Report introduced the concept of sustainable development1. In the decades since, the concept of computational sustainability has rapidly gained traction in communities ranging from Earth science and government policy, to computational science. More than a decade ago, Gomes defined computational sustainability as aiming to “identify, formalize, and provide solutions to computational problems concerning the balancing of environmental, economic, and societal needs for a sustainable future”2. A follow-up multi-institutional piece emphasized that sustainability can advance computational science by generating novel systems-level computational challenges involving “uncertainty, machine learning, optimization, remote sensing, and decision-making”3.

Unfortunately, because of the relative novelty of computational sustainability as a research area – involving several areas of expertise owing to its interdisciplinary nature — higher education at the collegiate level is lagging behind in training and equipping students with the right computational frameworks and tools to address the most challenging system-level problems of our time.

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References

  1. World Commission on Environment and Development. Our Common Future (Oxford Univ. Press, 1987).

  2. Gomes, C. P. Computational sustainability: Computational methods for a sustainable environment, economy, and society. In Frontiers of Engineering: Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering from the 2009 Symposium 27–40 (The National Academies Press, 2010).

  3. Gomes, C. et al. Commun. ACM 62, 56–65 (2019).

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  4. Pennington, D. et al. Sustain. Sci. 15, 647–661 (2020).

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  5. Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2015).

  6. Sustainability Across the Curriculum Initiative (USC, 2024); https://dornsife-wrigley.usc.edu/education/sustainability-across-the-curriculum-initiative/

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the support of the USC Sustainability Across the Curriculum initiative in facilitating our collaboration.

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  1. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Mayank Kejriwal & Victoria Petryshyn

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  1. Mayank Kejriwal
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  2. Victoria Petryshyn
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M.K. and V.P. both contributed to writing, revision, and conception.

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Correspondence to Mayank Kejriwal.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Kejriwal, M., Petryshyn, V. Advancing computational sustainability in higher education. Nat Comput Sci 4, 382–383 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-024-00638-z

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