Summary
The paper discusses the concept of ‘one-world’ chemistry that takes a systems approach bringing together many factors, including ethics and sustainability, that are critical to the future role of chemistry. Authors point out that one-world chemistry demands the role of systems be embraced, and they give three examples illustrating the way that systems thinking has come to be understood as an essential component of chemistry’s progress.
First example is the chlorofluorocarbons. Because of their chemical inertness, low toxicity and flammability, and suitably low boiling points, low-molecular weight chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were widely adopted for use as refrigerants in domestic refrigerators, as propellants in aerosol cans and as fire-fighting agents. However, the later discovery of the accumulation of CFCs in the atmosphere, their damaging effects on stratospheric ozone levels and the resulting threats to human health and ecosystems led to the stop of their use and to their replacement with safer substitutes. This highlights our evolving recognition of the need “to bridge traditional scientific disciplines and examine the Earth as an interrelated system of physical, chemical, and biological processes”. Persuading the world’s governments to adopt the replacement of chlorofluorocarbons was a clear example where systems thinking was central to understanding and responding to a global challenge — with chemistry being a key part of both the recognition and solution of the problem.
Second example is the antibiotics. From Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928 until the late twentieth century, chemistry provided new antibiotics resulting in a decrease of deaths from infections from around 43% of all deaths to fewer than 7%. However, antimicrobial resistance in microorganisms is now regarded as one of the greatest current challenges to global health, causing serious health problems and economic losses in every part of the world. Several factors are driving this crisis, including clinical misuse and massive veterinary use of antibiotics and environmental contamination. The necessary action to avert the antibiotic crisis must include recognizing that human health, animal health and the environment are very closely and interactively linked together and must draw on chemistry’s contributions to create new diagnostics and treatments, cleaner processes for antibiotic manufacture and procedures for the treatment of wastewaters to avoid environmental contamination, as well as cheaper, faster and more convenient analytical tools to detect antibiotics in the environment.
Third example is plastic waste in the sea. During the twentieth century, plastics have transformed materials in everyday use, providing convenient packaging for food and beverages and structural materials for various applications. But these valued applications of chemistry are now understood to have some long-term disadvantages, including that they create plastic waste that does not easily break down and is accumulating in the environment both on land and in the sea. Among them, plastic microbeads and submillimetre particles that are generated when plastic products degrade cause problems for smaller organisms when ingested and can accumulate in the food chain with adverse physiological and metabolic effects. The problem of plastic waste has arisen because of lack of systems thinking — a failure to look beyond the immediate utility of a product during its active life. In all areas of product manufacture, systems thinking requires that recycling considerations should be included from the outset, taking an overview of the beginning-to-end life of a product, including its life as waste and as recyclable material.
Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
The paper deals with interdisciplinarity, systems thinking, sustainable development, and complexity.
Within a complex and mature discipline such as chemistry, both the inspiration for research and the capacity to tackle problems often originates through interdisciplinary convergences. Thus, chemistry has increasingly been drawn into engagements across disciplines, the nature of which can take a number of different forms: (a) multidisciplinary — bringing together knowledge and problem-solving approaches from a host of fields that can each contribute, ‘side by side’, to different stages or aspects of problem-solving; (b) interdisciplinary — developing expertise in working across the boundaries between chemistry and other disciplines and transferring methods from one discipline to another; (c) transdisciplinary — beyond interdisciplinary (which still implies the autonomy of subjects working in cooperation), creating a new synthesis of chemistry and other subjects in which knowledge, methods and solutions are developed holistically: recognizing that valuable knowledge can be found in the spaces between defined disciplines, addressing the complexity of problems and the diversity of perceptions of them; and representing a transition from compartmentalized, corrective, problem-solving approaches to systemic approaches that seek to prevent the occurrence of problems.
According to the authors, the concept of one-world chemistry demands that the role of systems be embraced. Chemistry cannot be separated from the context in which it is conducted, and its practice must be considered in relation to its impacts on many interconnected systems. It is therefore important that the chemistry system is considered in relation to many other systems with which it interfaces, including the biosphere, the environment, human and animal health, economics, politics, psychology and law. Chemistry should not be taught or practiced without pointing to the need of being aware of the potential for these relationships — that is, education and practice in chemistry must be informed by systems thinking.
The paper defines sustainable development as the development that meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. According to the authors, chemistry must play a central role in tackling global challenges, via addressing the Sustainable Development Goals. To do so effectively, a radical repositioning of the field of chemistry is proposed, the one-world chemistry that reflects chemistry’s evolution towards becoming a central ‘sustainability science’.
The paper connects the complexity of structures and problems addressed by chemistry with the complexity of chemical thinking.
