Computational Sustainability: Computational Methods for a Sustainable Environment, Economy, and Society

Poverty, saving species, repowering the world with renewable energy, lifting people up to live better lives - there are no easy answers to guiding our planet on a path toward sustainability. Complex problems require sophisticated solutions. They involve intricacy beyond human capabilities, the kind of big-data processing and analysis that only advanced large-scale computing can provide. Computational sustainability is, at its core, the belief that with sufficiently advanced computational techniques, we can devise sustainable solutions that meet the environmental, societal, and economic needs of today while providing for future generations. Advancements in computational sustainability will lead to novel, low-cost, and high-efficiency strategies for saving endangered species, helping indigenous peoples improve their ways of life, and scaling renewables up to meet 21st century energy demand, while advancing computational sciences. In this Expedition in Computing, we created the Institute for Computational Sustainability (http://computational-sustainability.cis.cornell.edu) and established the new field of computational sustainability. The overarching goal is to identify, formalize, and provide solutions to computational problems to help solve environmental, economic, and societal problems and thereby facilitate a path towards a sustainable future. The Expedition identified cross-cutting computational problems in sustainability and helped create a community of researchers to solve those problems. See also the Expeditions in Computing CompSustNet: Expanding the Horizons of Computational Sustainability, CCF-1522054.