Concept of Sustainability is holistic. It is individually addressed to specific areas of development like energy and environment, agriculture, organic farming, biodiversity as well as ELSI issues. Hence, individual contribution of sustainability concept to each of these areas will, in turn help in developing the issues need to address climate change in entirity. For example, Sustainable Agriculture Practices (SAPs) like minimal use of fertilisers, pesticides, use of FYM (Farm Yard Manure), Gobar Gas, farm pond etc. help in reducing GHG emissions as well as pollution, which inturn greatly contributes to address issues responsible for GCC.

"How would the concept of sustainability be applied in order to address Climate Change?"

carefully

p.s. by the way, nice question...

Sustainability is the capacity to endure. Climate change studies are also meant for ultimately developing climatic resilient environment. So, both the terms are very closely related and complementary to each other....

The term "sustainability" is today used to express "environmental friendly" processes, technologies and methods. A "buzz" word without scientific weight including for CC related abatement strategies.

Climate is per definition a "every changing" process. The development of sustainable strategies in order to develop "resilient environments" will never succeed because it is counterproductive. The climate will always change and these change will effect the environments as they always have done since the dawn of times.

However, sustainable developments are meant by political decision makers as regulatory methods in order to slow down or even reduce the human impact on the currently observed climate change. In this sense, it is expected that sustainable developments (i.e., green chemistry,, CCS etc) will slow down the rapid changing global climate. However, due to the slow response time of our global climate systems and the long history of human impact (significantly contributing on a global scale since the industrial revolution around 150 years ago), as well as the political inability to find joint global solutions over the past 40 years (after CC was put on the global agenda), these strategies are expected to fail.

Any ideas how to solve this challenge?

{Believing that sustainable development, which implies meeting the needs

of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet

their own needs, should become a central guiding principle of the United

Nations, Governments and private institutions, organizations and enterprises}.

United Nations, Brundtland Report,1987

Solving the challenge starts from, as the statement claims, BELIEVING. As Roland says "these strategies are expected to fail", I w'd add they have failed, not because of the strategies themselves, but due to the intention behind them. This intention doesn't reflect "Believing"

This is a simple question on the surface which has many hidden complexities. I think Roland raised several important issues, one of the most important ones being that it is not possible to separate the technical issues from the political ones in this type of problem. However, to address your question directly rather than commenting on its wider implications, I think there are three main ways in which the concept of sustainability can be applied to the issue of climate change.

1. If we focus on the literal meaning of sustainability (as the capacity to survive) then it can serve as a quantitative framework for assessing how different aspects of CC will affect us in the future. In this type of research it is essential to define clearly the entities or systems whose sustainability is of interest.

2. If we use the loose, hand-waving, political definition of sustainability we can still apply the concept in the general sense that the negative effects of CC will tend to decrease sustainability, but the cost of avoiding such impacts has to be considered in many cases as a trade-off for immediate economic benefits.

3. Finally, the concept can be applied in a more abstract way, as a stimulus to raise awareness and motivate change. A good analogy here would be what happened as the Y2K computer issues approached at the end of the 1990's. The threat of potential problems acted as a stimulus to a lot of effort to head off problems in advance. We cannot run the counterfactual analysis and know what would have happened had all those efforts not been made, all we can say is that in the end, with all the care that was taken, the impacts were rather minor. The threat of loss of sustainability (even if the actual implications are rather vague) may serve as a similar motivation to effect change on issues connected with CC.

There are a couple of aspects to this important question on how sustainability and climate change response could/should be linked:

1. 'mainstreaming'; this is the idea that emission reduction (green energy, afforestation, energy efficiency, etc.) and vulnerability reduction (adaptive management, risk management, etc.) become part of a new 'business as usual' within governance structures and fields of practice (engineering, economic development, urban planning, insurance, resource management, energy, etc.).

2. 'extension'; this is the promotion of continuous knowledge exchange between research and practice, an activity that is well known in some fields (e.g. agriculture, forestry), and could be very helpful in bringing new ideas to other fields of practice that support governance and the private sector. This can be enabled by the creation of 'boundary organizations', which have, as their mandate, the promotion of knowledge exchange.

For either or both of these activities to be successful, champions are needed to promote them within different communities/countries and fields of practice. And, research on these processes could offer examples of successful applications.

Thanks Stewart