Complex human-natural systems on Earth and in Space: Emerging Tools to Advance Just Outcomes for Long Term Challenges

Abstract:

The global commons – Antarctica, Earth’s Orbit, the oceans, the atmosphere –illustrate the pivotal need to understand complex natural-human systems and the benefits of interdisciplinary work to characterize risk. Such risks require great care to understand when they unfold over long time scales, extend over wide geographic areas and result from the distributed actions of many actors. Consider, for example, the risk of sea level rise and coastal erosion menacing an equatorial mega-city and its links to ice sheet melting in Antarctica; or consider the risk of a catastrophic series of satellite collisions in Low Earth Orbit. What analysis frameworks and collaboration approaches allow scholars, policy makers, community members and business leaders to communicate in mutually understandable language to answer key questions about these risks? What data sources are useful to characterize the relationship between human actions that change the environment and environmental forces that have social, cultural and economic impact? What data sources reveal the inequitable distribution of environmental harm that often threatens human communities with limited economic resources, such as indigenous peoples and small island nations? This presentation highlights research projects by the Space Enabled Research Group (MIT Media Lab) and our collaborators that show examples of interdisciplinary approaches to address complex systems problems at the nature-human interface. The Space Sustainability Rating project includes effort to characterize the risk of collision among space objects, estimate the difficulty of tracking satellites and create incentives for satellite operators to reduce space debris. The Antarctica Museum Project designs an experience to expose families to a broad range of data about the geography, wildlife and research traditions of Antarctica while explaining how global coastal resilience is linked to the sustainability of southern ice sheets. The projects reveal that a variety of approaches, including physics simulations, business strategy, industrial design, policy analysis, history and earth science are needed to progress in mitigating the risks in complex, natural-human systems.