Thursday, October 1, 2015
8:30 am – 5:00 pm
Hilton Doubletree: Encantada I
Satellite Organizer
Carlo Jaeger, Global Climate Forum, Germany
Abstract
One of the biggest challenges of the 21st century will be to reconcile the need of billions of people to reach a decent standard of living in tomorrows world economy with the need to reduce critical emissions and impacts of that economy on the environment. This is the challenge of green growth. It involves daunting complexities, and it would be a dismal failure to neglect them in the research agenda of complexity science.
So far proposals to address the green growth challenge are shaped by attempts to frame it as a problem of optimal control – whether they aim at moderate or accelerated growth, or even what is sometimes called de-growth. But the challenge can hardly be met without accepting the need of a co-evolutionary dynamics where no single agent controls the system as a whole.
This requires to move from a view of the economy as a system characterized by a single stable equilibrium trajectory to an understanding of the economy as a multistable system where different futures can be triggered by a combination of purposeful action and random events.
In a similar way, it requires an analysis of the interactions between the economy, other social systems and the environment in terms of a co-evolution of complex adaptive systems.
The session shall help participants to improve this kind of ideas by applying them to practical issues like climate change negotiations or the development of sustainable cities.