Spurring Impactful Research on Information Systems for Environmental Sustainability

As the future of our ecosystem and society hangs in delicate balance, sustainability issues have come to the societal and governmental forefront. Organizations, governments, and cross-national bodies are turning their attention to the question of how we can make the world a better place. Sustainability is a complex term that can encompass environmental, economic, and societal issues. In essence, sustainability is conservation, deployment, and reuse of resources in responsible ways. From an organizational perspective, sustainability has been widely operationalized as endeavoring to achieve societal goals within commercial goals in such a way as to optimize social, environmental, and economic dimensions simultaneously—rather than these goals being treated as trade-offs (Porter and Kramer 2006).