The Forum: Science and Innovation for Sustainable Development seeks to facilitate information exchange and discussion among the growing and diverse group of individuals, institutions, and networks engaged in the field of science and technology for sustainability and to provide access to emerging ideas, relevant activities, key documents and web sites. The Forum covers evolving discussions over the core themes and challenges for knowledge and action of science and technology for sustainability, documents that chart the field's aims and progress, events of special interest to the community, and programs and institutions that are playing a special role in the evolution of the field. It also includes relevant commentary on posted documents and core questions, and is attempting to grow a section highlighting good examples of integrated studies of nature-society systems and courses and educational programs. Selection of content seeks to locate items that go beyond the study of environment and development separately and deal with the contributions of S&T to sustainable development.

Most of the content in the Forum is organized and cross-referenced within a Framework comprised of Critical Sectors, Development Goals, Geographic Region, and Research Themes. Critical Sectors is based on the United Nations 'WEHAB' Framework while Development Goals are based on the Millennium Development Goals. Research Themes describe specific science and technology attributes of the content and are adapted from the Core Questions. Inclusion in one or more of these areas allows the Forum to understand the growing body of content and refer new materials to users according to their interests. Some content is further identified as Featured by the Editors and is offered via top-level pages and the right-hand menu. Please note that to enable wider accessibility the Forum has been designed to make minimal use of graphics and other features that might result in slow downloads for our low-bandwidth users.

The concept of this web site grew out of discussions at the Friibergh Workshop on Sustainability Science. It was initially envisioned as a means of providing access to the Workshop documents, deliberations, and conclusions, and for the subsequent regional consultations to be held in 2001. However, upon further reflection the organizing committee for the workshop began to envision a broader role that such a site might play. Information on sustainable development per se can be found on existing web sites, most of them accessible through the Sustainable Development Gateway, while resources such as the Population-Environment Research Network and others effectively provide growing access to a wide range of information on social and environmental science research. However, the organizing committee felt that a central location for information relating to the specific role of science within the sustainable development process was needed. Thus the organizing committee enabled the first iteration of this concept, launching the Forum on Science and Technology for Sustainability. This Forum evolved over time and has now been relaunched in its current iteration by AAAS. We hope that this new Forum will continue to serve those functions envisioned at the Friibergh Workshop.

The Forum was founded in the belief that there is much more going on than meets most eyes involving the application of science and technology to sustainability issues. In this spirit, the Network for Science and Technology for Sustainability is an effort to help build a virtual community linking disparate scholars, managers, and decision makers, and to promote the sharing of knowledge, ideas, and goals among a community working on science and technology for sustainability. The Network Members and Projects also serve as a central nexus for the content of the Forum.

Individuals interested in these issues may join the Network as a means of telling others about their work and interests, and learning from others about related activities in the conduct or application of S&T in support of the joint goals of a sustainability transition: meeting human needs while preserving the life support systems of planet Earth. Through the Network, we hope to learn of the diversity of research efforts at all scales of endeavors (local, regional, and global), to identify new themes to explore and new collaborators to relate to, and to devise meaningful ways, beyond chat rooms and email lists, to make the promise of web-initiated relationships useful.