2022 Future of Global Governance Series

Proceedings for Keynote Presentation by Jim Hall, FREng on Systems Science

by the Center for Global Agenda (CGA) at Unbuilt Labs and the Global Consortium for Systems Research (GCSR) at the UN General Assembly Science Summit

29 September, 2022

Abstract

The Global Consortium for Systems Research (GCSR) announced the GCSR 2022-2023 10th Anniversary Strategic Plan during the session including the new mandate “We study, forecast, and guide systems change to solve grand challenges”. GCSR invited Jim Hall, FREng to deliver a keynote presentation on system science.

Excerpts

Excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Jim Hall, FREng (Professor of Climate and Environmental Risks and Director of Research at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford):

JH: Hello, Marvin. Hello, colleagues. It is a great pleasure and an honour to be here this afternoon, this afternoon in England at least and to say a few words on this topic of systems, and in particular, how systems analysis are applied or not applied in policy and government settings.

JH: Let me just begin with a few words about what is understood by a system: a focus on a system means a focus on interactions – not dwelling obsessively from a reductive point of view at the individual entities and seeking to understand them in all of their detail, but instead looking at how the entities within the system interact with one another, and how those interactions then lead to and help to explain the things that we observe. The properties we observe at a macro scale (emergent properties through complex interactions) in many different ways shape the world in which we are living. The biggest problems we face are systems problems.

JH: If we think about climate change, for example, we recognize vast numbers of interactions, both leading to carbon emissions and emissions of other greenhouse gases, but also how the Earth system responds to those carbon emissions with interactions between the Earth's surfaces, ecosystems, the oceans, the atmosphere, and the cryosphere. In a sense, climate is an emergent property of those interactions. If we look at energy (which is the greatest contributor to carbon emissions) to understand how we are going to get carbon emissions down based on how we produce and use energy, we need to understand energy as a system. So what are the sources of energy (the majority of them being hydrocarbons at the moment), and how do those sources transform? For example, how is gas turned into electricity in gas turbines; what is the demand for or uses of energy?

JH: In order to understand the energy crisis we face at the moment, we have to understand the position of Russia and the countries which consume fossil fuels produced in Russia, how those interact with each other spatially, or what the effect of the shock of conflict on that system ends up being. If we are going to decarbonize the power system, that requires a system view as well. For example, why would we be interested in hydrogen? if you are going to use it to heat your house, it does not make much sense at all. One has to electrolyze water to create hydrogen, pump hydrogen around, and then burn it again in your house – it would make much more sense just to heat your house with electricity. But if one understands all of the multiple potential uses of hydrogen not just for heating, but as an energy storage medium - as a means of propulsion in ships and possibly aeroplanes; as an industrial feedstock for a number of industries which are difficult to decarbonise, like the steel industry. If you put that system together, then you begin to understand the motivation for why hydrogen is such an interesting product. And it is only by understanding things as a system that you can make that case.

JH: Let me just say a few brief words about the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals because in many sense they are a system par excellence. I am not saying they are perfect, but they are in a sense the best we have of a complete description of what the world collectively has said that it wants. It is that attempt at completeness which I really love about the 2030 SDGs and all of their flaws. But then as soon as we begin thinking about the implementation of the 2030 SDGs, again, we begin to see a whole host of interactions that these individual goals and targets cannot be attacked on their own. Indeed we have plenty of opportunities to do multiple beneficial things at the same time by adopting strategies which span across the 2030 SDGs and tackle those points of leverage, those points of system intervention where we might have the opportunity for the most benefit.

JH: So how does all of that then play into the role of government? The short answer there would be to say with difficulty that governments all over the world struggle with coordination problems. They are created as hierarchies. Of course everywhere has a leader of some shape or form and from that cascades a hierarchy and almost inevitably a series of silos. Governments inevitably struggle with systems challenges and the response, which is coordination across government is something I think it would be true to say every government struggles with.

JH: The first thing I would say about that is not to agonize too much because this is a challenge which every government faces and is addressing it more or less imperfectly. The second thing is that if you can address a problem in a silo then why not? That is the by far the easiest way of doing it give your silo a target and tell that silo to get on with it and so in that way if we can narrow down the number of truly cross cutting issues that we are dealing with then that makes the challenge of government a bit easier. The third point to make is if interdependences are inevitable and they are of course, then there are ways in which we can appeal to self-organization whilst having some sense of problem ownership. I think that is needed. But sometimes there is a kind of knee-jerk reaction when a cross cutting problem is identified to create another cabinet committee with another minister in charge of it and those things usually run out of steam and then end up getting abolished. Whereas if people can be empowered to self-organize their systems problems maybe they are more enduring.

JH: The fourth point to make, and this is in the sense a classic systems remark is be open to learning an adaptation. Recognize that mistakes are going to be made and create structures which can monitor, can understand what is going on, learn from that monitoring, and can adapt very quickly. In many governments across the world, the COVID pandemic forced government to learn and to adapt and to create new ways of working incredibly rapidly and on many occasions incredibly creatively.

JH: Actually I have just been at a government committee meeting today and many of the officials there the night before had been at a big celebration of party. Really, covid related parties has gotten a bad reputation in this country but this was an official one in which the civil service had brought together hundreds of civil servants who had worked incredibly hard to adapt and change the way in which they work in order to manage the covid crises. One of the points of discussion is well what can we learn from this? What can we build in, from the way in which we did adapt in order to address systems problems in a better way in the future? But I think there is also the other kind of sense from that gathering was we do not want to do this again very soon and unfortunately we seem to be living in a world where dramatic shocks are happening very frequently because following COVID we now have an energy crisis and accompanying cost of living crisis right away across the world. But amongst, this we have to really put a premium value on stability because a lot of things that I am talking about are extremely difficult to achieve during turmoil. So this is a question of balancing that lesson to make mistakes, learn, adapt, sprint from time to time with a need to value stability within systems.

JH: I am conscious of time, but I just wanted to make two more remarks. One is on the role of system models in their broader sense and that includes computer models. There are many domains in which one would not embark upon a water resource management plan or an energy system decarbonisation without a model. These days one has to be cautious about that role of models. But what do they do? The first thing is that even though they are all wrong, they give a sense of proportion, they tell you how things add up and that is really important. They provide a boundary around which different actors within the system ideally can congregate and develop a shared understanding of that system to explore possible futures and scenarios – not to predict the future – I do not think that is possible but to explore the future and to understand sensitivities and intervention points.

JH: The final point I want to make, however, is around alienation versus participation. A lot of what I am talking about either turns people off or they find it completely inaccessible or both. Part of my research program has been around developing so called system of systems model but I have been told very firmly that the terminology system of systems just does not work for policy makers. Members of the general public for the most part have not got a clue what it is getting at. We have to be extremely careful about elitism within this context. Think very carefully about how we can make that type of discourse accessible. I think a big part of that is around articulation of purpose and creating narratives around how systems can achieve that purpose for people. And that, I think, is about the best we can do.