This joint conference of the International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE) and the International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technology (ISSST) emphasizes the crucial role that research in Industrial Ecology and Sustainable Systems plays in the planning, design, and governance of linked human-natural communities, the importance for understanding the complexity of such systems and the responses they exhibit in response to both long term and short term perturbations, and how this knowledge can be applied to devise holistic solutions across multiple spatial and temporal scales, and organizational settings.