Sustainable provision of food and water using an interdisciplinary, system-of-systems framework

Although sustainability is an essential concept to ensuring the future of humanity and integrity of the resources and ecosystems on which we depend, identification of a comprehensive approach to assess and enhance sustainability is another grand challenge. Fortuitously, in a groundbreaking re-conceptualization of the problem, we identified the collective limitations of the current suite of approaches used to assess sustainability and instead proposed a computational, system-of-systems framework that is causal, modular, tiered, and scalable. Our approach incorporates a comprehensive definition of sustainability as well as new educational structures to systematically and computationally connect across the disciplines. It also aspires to address the political, economic, and decision-making challenges that limit the applicability of science and technical solutions to wicked problems...