Climate smart investment with visioneering by monitoring energy, matter and information flows
Joon Kim
Institute of Green Bio Science and Technology, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Sustainability science is an emerging trans-disciplinary research which necessitates not only the communication and collaboration of scientists and practitioners from different disciplines, but also the paradigm shift from deterministic and reductionist approaches to the old basic (i.e., the fundamental laws of nature). Rural-urban systems are co-evolving complex systems that are defined as systems having many interacting parts (or agents), whose interactions give rise to dynamic, non-linear and indeterministic outcomes through self-organizing processes. We introduce a conceptual framework for such continually morphing dynamical systems, i.e. self-organizing hierarchical open systems (SOHO).
To understand the structure and working of SOHO, we revisit the two fundamental laws of physics (i.e., the entropy law and the action law). The re-interpretation of these laws elucidates that energy dispersal between a system and its environment will occur along the paths of least action (or in the least possible time) and throughput (i.e., the movement of a material through a system such as the flow of energy, matter and information) plays a key role. We introduce an additional essential framework, the so-called visioneering (V) (i.e. engineering of vision) - skilful direction and creative application of experience and scientific principles to fulfil the vision. The V process is then integrated with the SOHO framework as feedforward loops so that ‘a minimally guided (or nudged) self-organization process’ may enable decision makers to choose better path (or scenario) toward sustainable rural-urban systems. (Acknowledgment: This work was funded by the Weather Information Service Engine Program of the Korea Meteorological Administration under Grant KMIPA-2012-0001.)