The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted our lives in various aspects. It has brought a global public health crisis and a global economic crisis. It forces us to adapt to the condition to generate a resilient community. For that purpose, we need to provoke more adaptive policies. Policymakers and citizens need efforts to revive economic activity to build back better. It means addressing structural inequalities, accelerating the green transition, and strengthening resilience in facing future challenges. A quality recovery would help set the world on course for mid- and long-term agendas and facilitate progress toward the SDGs.

A comprehensive approach is required in accelerating post-covid-19 recovery development towards SDGs that Sustainability Science can offer. This approach can be defined as a multi/interdisciplinary study of interactions between nature and societies that bring together the natural, social, and technological sciences to ensure the needs of present and future generations can be met. Sustainability science is an evolving academic discipline that can point the way to a sustainable global society by facing challenges that existing fields have not addressed. It creates a transdisciplinary academic structure and discovery process that fuses the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The conceptual understanding of post-covid-19 recovery development can be found in some emerging issues, including urban and rural development planning, disaster preparedness and mitigation, localization of culture in SDG, Biotechnology and health development, sustainable agricultural business, natural resources and environmental management, local tourism and creative industry.

Based on those rationales, the Graduate Program of Universitas Andalas holds a conference to bring together academia, researchers, business entrepreneurs, practitioners, and policymakers responsible for accelerating post-covid-19 recovery development towards SDGs. The main objective of this event is to enhance the discourse and discussion on post-covid-19 recovery, especially on the issue of governance challenges to achieve SDGs.