Computational Sustainability

Abstract

This is a consolidated look at computational techniques for sustainability, and their limits and possibilities. Sustainability is already well established as a concern and a topic of study and practice, given the alarming increase of environmental degradation, pollution, and other adverse effects of industrialization and urbanization. Computational sustainability, which focuses on the use of effective computational models and computational approaches to help achieve the goal of sustainability, has attracted interest from computer science researchers worldwide. We review recent work on computational techniques applied to a range of domains related to sustainability, from bio-surveillance to poverty mapping, from renewable energy production forecasting to crop disease monitoring, and from agent-based modeling to stochastic network design. In sustainable computing, we discuss some directions that have recently been explored. Finally, we analyze research directions that could be explored in the future to achieve the goal of long-term environmental sustainability.