Welcome to the website of the Sustainable Development Research Initiative (SDRI), a research group within the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES), at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

We are committed to undertake research on sustainability that advances knowledge and contributes to the solution of real-world problems. Our research is:

• Interdisciplinary (society's problems don't come in neat disciplinary packages)
• Relevant to decision-makers and policy makers (since changes in behaviour and policies are required to achieve sustainability), and
• Based on the involvement of non-academic partners in the research process (since we need both the knowledge and the engagement of other partners to accomplish our research).

To us, sustainability requires an reconciliation of the ecological imperative to stay within the carrying capacity of the planet, the economic imperative to provide an adequate standard of living for all, and the social imperative to develop forms of governance that promote the values people want to live by. We believe that how that reconciliation should be done in any specific region or case can best be determined by participatory processes of community engagement that involve multiple stakeholders thinking through the choices and trade-offs facing their community. In this sense, sustainability in practice can be seen as the emergent property of a discussion about desired futures that is informed by some understanding of the ecological, social and economic consequences of different courses of action.

SDRI consists of a core group of faculty, staff and graduate students committed to working together in support of this approach.