Development unavoidably impacts the ecosystems constituting Earth’s biosphere, often producing complex outcomes across a range of spatial and temporal scales. The interconnectivity of global ecosystems and their varied responses to disturbance necessitate great caution when using or encountering terms such as “sustainable” and “sustainability”. The Environment Ontology (ENVO; www.environmentontology.org) is coordinating with the Sustainable Development Goals Interface Ontology (SDGIO) to improve semantic representation of environments in the context of global development. In this talk, we will present progress towards this goal, emphasising the potential of ecosystem semantics in bridging and seeding new domain ontologies.