ISF offers our clients tailored solutions for complex sustainability challenges. We pool expertise and draw on our deep industry experience to develop outcomes to match your unique context and objectives.

Professor Damien Giurco, Deputy Director of Engagement at the Institute for Sustainable Futures

ISF: Our capabilities

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We look at the breadth of expertise that contributes towards creating a sustainable future.

ISF: Our capabilities transcript

Dani Alexander: ISF is a special butterfly; we work in so many areas.
So, we have a number of different research areas that are tackling this problem of a sustainable future from multiple different angles.

Damien Giurco: The breadth of expertise at ISF spans the technical, modelling analysis including with big data sets, to the human and the institutional; understanding the changes that will be needed in these spaces to deliver impact.

Stuart White: So, we're working with clients to develop and support them in solutions to sustainability problems. And secondly, we're applying a range of different disciplines and different ways of thinking to the problem, often learning from other areas and applying that across the problem that they're bringing to us.

Damien Giurco: When we work together in partnership, it's often as one big team and the thing that's important about this is the learning that's generated through the project manifests in our own team and that of the partner organisation.

Dani Alexander: We bring everyone together at the beginning and actually design the best solution with everyone's expertise in the same room and it's almost like a melting pot.

Stuart White: That's why all of our researchers have to think and operate in a completely interdisciplinary way, because that's how the problems of the world present themselves to us.

Damien Giurco: At ISF we believe there's no organisation too big or small to affect change we work with start-ups and entrepreneurs through to multinational organisations and governments at all scales, from the local right through to the United Nations.

Our expertise spans a range of areas, including business and economics, climate adaptation, energy, food systems, international development and more.

For more than 20 years, we’ve delivered independent, project-based research and consultancy services to commercial and government clients of all sizes.

When you partner with us, we’ll convene a specialist research team equipped with the specific mix of skills, experience and expertise required to produce your project.

What we offer our clients

Qualitative and quantitative services to help your organisation make decisions for the future.

Understanding the social, environmental and economic costs and benefits of policies and programs.

Designing, delivering and evaluating tailored participatory processes that put people at the heart of our clients' projects.

Preparing for the major changes ahead and using foresight to move towards more desirable futures.

Transforming businesses by building in-house expertise in sustainability research and practice.

Providing new evidence and insights to support decision-making and other outcomes.

Transparency and accountability, enhanced project performance and strategic resource allocation – that’s what effective monitoring and evaluation (M&E) can provide.

Delivering planning instruments and strategic advice for use in both urban and regional areas.

Scoping, designing, implementing and evaluating new and existing policy initiatives with sustainability at their centre.

Gathering data about behaviours, practices, knowledge, attitudes and values to inform policy and programs.

Designing and delivering rigorous, evidence-based stakeholder engagement methodologies, frameworks and tools.

Working with stakeholders to understand, navigate and facilitate transformation towards sustainable futures.

Two Engineering and Information Technology students conversing at the University of Technology Sydney

Graduate research program

ISF has an award-winning graduate research program for Masters and Doctoral students.