Where to put the fence? Setting sustainability goals may be analogized to putting up fences around safe operating space, but the true problem landscape is often much more complex.
Image Credit: Anders Sandberg and Andy Council

By Len Fisher, Thilo Gross, Helmut Hillebrand, Anders Sandberg, and Hiroki Sayama.

Read the full paper here.

Today’s global challenges, including climate change and sustainability, involve a complex web of a large number of interlinked factors that must be considered altogether. However, they are often dealt with by considering an individual factor or measurement in isolation, especially in political settings. For example, the global climate change is often discussed with a simple goal to limit global average temperature increase to 1.5°C. Such approaches would tend to miss the “emergent” properties of those complex networks of many entities, that is, the properties of complex systems that cannot be predicted easily by looking at individual entities separately. In this perspective article, we argue that recent progresses in complex systems science and other related scientific fields can help us understand and manage such entwined systems better, which will offer the promise of a new approach to sustainability. Specifically, we discuss the following three points for sustainability: (1) We need to set whole system-level outcomes as the goals for sustainability instead of simple targets. (2) We should not think about those sustainability goals as fixed goal posts, but rather, we must be adaptive and open-ended. (3) We can utilize market and insurance mechanisms as practical tools for policy and decision making about sustainability in an ongoing dynamic situation.