Interdisciplinary integration on sustainable development issues

In order to achieve sustainable development, we need a deep understanding of both social and humanitarian processes and relationships in living and nonliving nature. The development of scientific research areas that are related to sustainability are very important. Unfortunately, sustainable development is not among scientific and technical priorities in Russian Federation. This study analyzes the dynamics of PhD and Doctoral dissertations on sustainable development performed in various areas of science in the USSR and Russia in 1987-2019. The majority of dissertations (1 322 in total) were in the area of economics (85.4 %), while significantly fewer were in philosophy (2.9 %), technical (2.3%), and geographical (2.2 %) sciences. There are almost no dissertations in the fields of biological and chemical sciences, pharmaceutics and medicine. Our data indicate a significant imbalance and economic bias in the study of sustainable development issues. In this regard, it can be assumed that interdisciplinarity, which can be implemented in the framework of convergent and transdisciplinary approaches, is one of important methodological problem of sustainable development. Examples of relevant interdisciplinary projects are considered. © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2020.