With the Sustainable Development Goals as central pillar informing many policies by governments and legislation, we get to think about what it means to include our natural environment as more than a passive backdrop in our operational and business environments.

What are the foundations from sustainability science, what are the legal aspects, and what are requirements engineering approaches to deal with this? I give an overview of the work I have done in this area and connect to new ideas on an agroecology case to widen our understanding of how nature is a relevant stakeholder.

Birgit Penzenstadler is faculty at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and Lappeenranta Lahti University of Technology, Finland (before: California State University Long Beach). Her research focus is how neuroplasticity practices can support engineers and other computer workers in improving their presence, creativity, cognitive abilities, immune systems, sleep and overall resilience (for details, see https://www.twinkleflip.com). She has been researching the relation between sustainability and software engineering for a decade and focuses on artifact-based requirements engineering and requirements engineering for sustainability. Her expertise includes requirements elicitation, analysis, design and documentation techniques, for example sustainability goal modeling, as well as artifact models, quality modeling, tool support, and process improvement (see https://www.sustainabilitydesign.org and http://birgit.penzenstadler.de). Penzenstadler received a habilitation from the Technical University of Munich’s Faculty of Informatics. She’s a member of IEEE and ACM. Contact her at birgitp @ chalmers.se