Systemic challenges associated with complex socio-environmental problems

Unfortunately, most studies of complex socio-environmental problems tend to focus on a few small subsystems, and simply ignore the dynamics of the larger systems. Consider, for example, food/energy/water, which may include interactions among watershed, land-use, agriculture, climate, energy, transportation, ecosystems, communication, as well as economic, legal and other social systems. A recent systematic review of 245 publications on food/energy/water revealed that most do not even capture interactions among water, energy and food, let alone the complex dynamics among many systems. In addition, most disciplines (e.g., hydrology, energy, transportation, ecosystems, and agriculture) tend to begin with their own system and then connect to a few components of other systems across a wide range of scales (e.g., local, urban, regional) meaning that there is no systematic basis to compare results to what has been done before in the individual disciplines or knowledge domains. To make matters worse, most socio-environmental problems (e.g., climate change, food/energy/water, coastal flooding, disaster management, and urban planning) are generally treated as entirely separate problems, but are in fact intimately related and cannot be managed independently. To more effectively deal with these systemic challenges, we propose to divide the natural and anthropogenic world into socioeconomic, technical and environmental systems (e.g., as listed previously for food/energy/water); study and characterize them separately over a range of scales; and then systematically re-combine the systems in a generic system-of-systems framework to simultaneously address a wide range of socio-environmental problems. Although we do not expect to be able to predict the future, we should be able to manage complex socio-environmental problems more systematically and more comprehensively than is currently achieved. We further acknowledge that the approach will be subject to large uncertainties, but this does not preclude investigating opportunities and risks in a way that fosters integration of knowledge, understanding and trust.