Global Challenges: personal reflections on the Stockholm "New Shape" Competition

Fisher, Len

doi:10.5962/p.361839

Cited by 3 publications

References 27 publications

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Sustainability: We need to focus on overall system outcomes rather than simplistic targets

Fisher,

Gross,

Hillebrand

et al. 2024

People and Nature

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Many of the global challenges that confront humanity are interlinked in a dynamic complex network, with multiple feedback loops, nonlinear interactions and interdependencies that make it difficult, if not impossible, to consider individual threats in isolation. These challenges are mainly dealt with, however, by considering individual threats in isolation (at least in political terms). The mitigation of dual climate and biodiversity threats, for example, is linked to a univariate 1.5°C global warming boundary and a global area conservation target of 30% by 2030. The situation has been somewhat improved by efforts to account for interactions through multidimensional target setting, adaptive and open management and market‐based decision pathways. But the fundamental problem still remains—that complex systems such as those formed by the network of global threats have emergent properties that are more than the sum of their parts. We must learn how to deal with or live with these properties if we are to find effective ways to cope with the threats, individually and collectively. Here, we argue that recent progresses in complex systems research and related fields have enhanced our ability to analyse and model such entwined systems to the extent that it offers the promise of a new approach to sustainability. We discuss how this may be achieved, both in theory and in practice, and how human cultural factors play an important but neglected role that could prove vital to achieving success. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

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Sustainability: We need to focus on overall system outcomes rather than simplistic targets

Fisher,

Gross,

Hillebrand

et al. 2024

People and Nature

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Achieving Transformation in Our Highly Interconnected World II: The Role of the Individual

Fisher

2022

The Kyoto Post-Covid Manifesto for Global Economics

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A Safe Governance Space for Humanity: Necessary Conditions for the Governance of Global Catastrophic Risks

Fisher

Sandberg

2022

Global Policy

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The world faces a multiplicity of global catastrophic risks (GCRs), whose functionality as individual and collective complex adaptive networks (CANs) poses unique problems for governance in a world that itself comprises an intricately interlinked set of CANs. Here we examine necessary conditions for new approaches to governance that consider the known properties of CANs-especially that small changes in one part of the system can cascade and amplify throughout the system and that the system as a whole can also undergo rapid, dramatic, and often unpredictable change with little or no warning.

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Global Challenges: personal reflections on the Stockholm "New Shape" Competition

Cited by 3 publications

References 27 publications

Sustainability: We need to focus on overall system outcomes rather than simplistic targets

Sustainability: We need to focus on overall system outcomes rather than simplistic targets

Achieving Transformation in Our Highly Interconnected World II: The Role of the Individual

A Safe Governance Space for Humanity: Necessary Conditions for the Governance of Global Catastrophic Risks

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