global environmental risks. In this special issue, data mining techniques are presentedthat explore and analyze environmental spatio-temporal data or help to design andoperate better sustainable systems.The introduction is structured as follows. First we describe the particular challengesand tasks of data mining for sustainability (Sect. 2). An overview of data mining inthe earth sciences indicates work towards the identified tasks (Sect. 2.1). Data miningfor the design and control of sustainable systems is illustrated by transportation issuesand energy-awareness (Sect. 2.2).As a service section, we include an overviewof organizations that provide dataminingwith data repositories (Sect. 3). This might inspire others to apply their algorithmsto the wealth of environmental data.We conclude with an overview of this issue’s articles (Sect. 4).