Abstract: We organized this Special Feature on “Modeling Dynamic Systems for Sustainable Development” to showcase the field’s recent advances. Much recent research in sustainability science has mobilized data and theory to better understand systems that include interacting people, technologies, institutions, ecosystems, and both social and environmental processes. A recent National Academies workshop and an Annual Review paper identified several challenges and open questions for the field, stressing the importance of developing and testing new theories to advance knowledge and guide action. However, there has been less attention in sustainability science towards integrating modeling with theory and data-focused approaches. Modeling is necessary for making projections about the dynamical implications of our present understanding of nature-society systems – which is essential to determining whether long term trends in nature-society interactions are consistent with sustainable development goals, and to analyze whether particular interventions (e.g. technologies, policies, behavior) are likely to change those interactions in ways that promote such goals.

The papers in this Special Feature highlight advances in simulating coupled nature-society systems. We believe that these techniques, if they were more widely adopted, could significantly improve the capacity of sustainability science researchers to test
theory, mobilize data, and inform action. Each contribution to the Special Feature addresses a specific area in which novel modeling approaches have demonstrated the capacity to advance theory and insight more broadly. The contributions were selected to be illustrative rather than comprehensive, and to facilitate connections across the communities they represent.