The concept of sustainable development has ancient roots, but in its modern connotation it emerged in the 1970s with reports from environmental and religious movements and 1980s with the report Our Common Future (1987).

• In the course of the 1990s, UN organizations, scientists from different disciplines and business organizations came to participate in the increasing number of conferences and reports. As a result, sustainable development became an overarching concept not unlike human rights and got divergent interpretations;
• One elements in this process is the changing perspective on the human-environment relation. The ongoing discoveries of science altered the view of Nature and Nature responded to the human impacts on her functionings with ever more visible feedbacks.
• The notion of Anthropocene is signaling these changes and is finding its way from the natural into the social sciences and philosophy, in the process reconnecting with views from the past and other cultures;
• The scientific community has responded to these developments with an attempt at transdisciplinary integration and synthesis, which has led to sustainability science as a separate branch of science. It aims at pluralism in methodology and epistemology and the main objectives are bridging natural and social sciences and connecting science and policy/activism;
• Political rganiation have, in collaboration with scientists and NGOs, launched the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the preeminent framework to communicate and monitor the necessary transformation to a more sustainable future.