The Current Opinion journals were developed out of the recognition that it is increasingly difficult for specialists to keep up to date with the expanding volume of information published in their subject. In Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, we help the reader by providing in a systematic manner: 1. The views of experts on current advances in environmental sustainability in a clear and readable form. 2. Evaluations of the most interesting papers, annotated by experts, from the great wealth of original publications. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability aims to track the emergence of a new innovative sustainability science discipline by integrating across regional and global systems with their typical dimensions, human-environment interactions and management challenges. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability thus emphasises the actual interdisciplinary sustainability research approaches, the solutions it provides and their dissemination and application. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability aims to stimulate scientifically grounded, interdisciplinary, multi-scale debate and exchange of ideas. It will contain polished, concise and timely review and synthesis papers. Additionally, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability will continue to publish papers on strategic research plans of Future Earth (http://www.icsu.org/future-earth) and related global-change projects. It will thus serve as an invaluable source of information for researchers, lecturers, teachers, professionals, policy makers and students. The subject of environmental sustainability is divided into 6 themed annual issues. Each theme helps to identify, understand and solve sustainability problems and are not mutually exclusive. The overlap results from the actual complexity of combining all the sustainability science dimensions and approaches. The themes are: 1. Environmental change issues; 2. Environmental change assessments; 3. System dynamics and sustainability; 4. Sustainability governance and transformation; 5. Sustainability challenges; 6. Sustainability science. This set allows for flexible integration of natural sciences with the social sciences, humanities and engineering disciplines. The themes focus on major global-change systems and problems (Themes 1-3), the emerging new transdisciplinary sustainability science, as generated in Future Earth or as part of the evolving UN's sustainable development goals (Themes 4 and 5) and a more philosophical reflection on approaches of sustainability science (Theme 6).