Skip to 0 minutes and 5 seconds Financial markets all around the world plunged yet again. In Rome, they made no progress on the controversial issue of biofuels. Ebola cases are now in the tens of thousands. We live in an increasingly complex, confusing, and multilayered world. Within pockets of London, there is still trouble tonight. The sheer interconnectedness of all our lives has thrown up massive challenges for policy makers. And the most controversial is that fossil fuels, like coal, to be phased out by the end of the century. But fresh thinking is allowing us to untangle complex issues and create much better models of potential outcomes of policy decisions, from worldwide to local levels. This approach is Global Systems Science.
Skip to 0 minutes and 59 seconds Global Systems Science brings together traditional science, social sciences, mathematics, and information and communication technologies. It finds ways of combining different kinds of data to create simulations of the impact of policies.
Skip to 1 minute and 17 seconds In this course, you will learn the key features of the Global Systems Science approach, and how it can be applied to the areas of finance, cities, the internet, climate change, and epidemics. These are all entangled systems of systems, with unclear boundaries. Those first carriers had scattered all over the world, before anyone even knew about SARS. Let’s take the case of SARS. How could the authorities best control transmission? A Global Systems Science approach brought together epidemiology, understandings of air transport, and analyses of individual behaviour to throw light on the best course of action. Now it’s standard practise to use this approach.
Skip to 2 minutes and 10 seconds In this course, case studies will help you better understand how local microdynamics interrelate with the global macrodynamics, from the bottom up and top down. But not only that, we’ll also show you how computer modelling can shed new light on policy consequences before they’re implemented.
