As demonstrated in the Sustainable Development Goals, the three main pillars of sustainability are environment, economy, and society. For achieving social and economic sustainability, environmental sustainability is a prerequisite. However, the Earth system is on the edge of crossing the thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt environmental change and result in deleterious or even catastrophic consequences. Recent evidence indicates that humanity has transgressed six planetary boundaries, including climate change and biosphere integrity. While the total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions continue to reach a new peak in 2023, biodiversity loss is happening at an unprecedented rate, with an average 69% decline in wildlife populations since 1970. As climate change and biodiversity loss are mainly anthropogenic-induced, these environmental issues have to be and can only be solved by humans. Sole technological transformation and innovation are largely insufficient for solving the environmental problems, but social transitions are also required. Humans’ underpinning value systems, goals, beliefs, and worldviews need to be changed to leverage the sustainability transformation within the human society, as they define how humans interact with nature, generate knowledge and technologies, and utilize natural and artificial resources. Therefore, the humanistic values of this era demand the inclusion of environmental sustainability, and building an eco-surplus culture is essential for the social transition away from eco-deficit dystopia. In contributing to the generation of knowledge that aids the social transitions toward an eco-surplus utopia, the Topical Collection welcomes viewpoints, reviews, and theoretical and empirical work that are related but not limited to these issues:

• Socio-cultural and economic issues that help mitigate and adapt to climate change and prevent biodiversity loss

• Socio-cultural and economic issues that support the development and implementation of nature-based solutions and artificial technologies for achieving environmental sustainability

• Factors that help restore the connection between nature and humans, such as science, art, literature, and lived experiences

• The psychology towards climate change, biodiversity loss, social transition, and technological transformation

• The roles of creativity, serendipity, and knowledge management in sustainability transformation

• Sustainable financing mechanism for climate change mitigation and adaptation as well as biodiversity conservation

• The roles of urban and rural humans in addressing climate change and biodiversity loss

• Global agreement, national commitments, and local actions for addressing climate change and biodiversity loss

This Collection supports and amplifies research related to SDG Goals.

Keywords: Nature-human nexus; environmental degradation; climate change; biodiversity loss; community science; citizen science; artificial intelligence; technology; innovations; knowledge management; humanities; adaptation and mitigation; conservation; finance

Geospatial Information Science experienced significant development and growth over the past two to three decades, and provides a multitude of approaches and tools to support the implementation of sustainable development and specifically the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). Since Geospatial Information Science catalyzes insights, perspectives and methodologies from a wide spectrum of disciplines and fields of study, it has an important role to play in bringing various stakeholders together so that geospatial resources for research, planning and decision-making for sustainable development can be obtained, hosted, shared and used in a coordinated, effective and useful way. Commendable progress has been made by the Geospatial Information Science community to make geospatial data available at various resolutions and scales, thus enabling the utilization of such data for a variety of applications, including sustainable development. This includes big data and citizen science applications to support the implementation of the SDGs in multi-inter-trans-disciplinary contexts.

The Topical Collection “Geospatial Information Science for Sustainable Development” provides a platform to explore, evaluate and showcase recent contributions by Geospatial Information Science to the UN SDGs. This includes challenges which are experienced and how these are addressed, and innovative and new approaches and technologies to advance knowledge production in this field. This call also includes submissions dealing with place-based applications of Geospatial Information Science to enhance sustainability in different regional contexts.

The Keywords are: Geospatial Information Science; Sustainable development; SDGs; Multi-inter-trans-disciplinary contexts, applications, and solutions