In South Africa, there is an urgent need to bring science, practice, and policy closer together for advancing sustainable development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There is also an urgent need to address the mis-alignment between Sustainability Science and Education System development. In this National Research Foundation (NRF) Community of Practice (CoP) we focus on transformative social learning that supports knowledge co-development, and knowledge uptake and use for solution oriented sustainable development actions. We do this to inform education system change. We arrange our contributions and collaborations along three thematic cluster areas: 

• Clean water supply and provisioning: Water quality monitoring, bio-technology and biological control (SDG6&9)
  
  
• Climate action: Adaptation, mitigation and resilience building, including food security and creating sustainable communities (SDG 13, 2 &11)
  
  
• Ecological infrastructure: Restoration, management and governance (SDG 14 &15).

This COP pro-actively brings together Education and Social Science Chairs and Senior Professors with 9 Sustainability Science Chairs and Senior Professors from 6 universities, amongst which 5 are SARChI Chairs and 5 Distinguished Professors, with extensive national and international Sustainability Sciences research experience across disciplinary backgrounds, making up a strong inter-disciplinary platform for developing transdisciplinary scientific practice. 

The CoPs aims, objectives, research questions and outcomes focus on Science, Policy and Practice. The emphasis will be on transformative social learning driving transdisciplinary sustainable development actions related to clean water, climate action, ecological infrastructure and related concerns (food security, biodiversity and sustainable communities) for learning and education system innovation.
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