Critical inter-disciplinary and inter-species approaches to water sustainability and climate change issues

This special issue represents critical intersections within and  between  different disciplinary fields, cultures and methodologies towards water sustainability praxis and understanding and climate change mitigation strategies. In recent years both an increasing volume of scientific research and successive international confer-ences on climate have made it very clear that the linkage between critical issues of sustainability (and indeed all the elements that comprise planet earth), continues to  be  under-considered.  No  element  or  cultural  context  is  any  less  significant than another. At the same time, recent discussions on issues like equity in access to fresh water and many other aspects related to climate change are often over-shadowed by the incessant emphasisplaced on the global goal to reduce earth’s atmospheric temperature by 1.5 degrees Celsius by actions such as reducing emis-sions or carbon capture. This is, of course, a critical issue, yet the quest for solu-tions requires understanding that all facets oflife, weather and climate are inex-tricably  interlinked,  as  strategies  for  resolving  or  mitigating  must  also  be.  Our search for “constructive alignment” (Biggs and Tang, 2015) between the ecolog-ical, socio-cultural, and economic concerns of sustainability involves making rad-ical  departures,  some of which  appear  in  each  of  the  papers  published  in  this Special Issue of Visions for Sustainability.