We catch up with Nick King and Professor Aled Jones from the Global Sustainability Institute to think about some of the consequences of pushing our planet and societies beyond their limits, how the world might look when the dust settles, and whether we can prevent the collapse of our increasingly complex systems. As we discuss their 2020 article in Sustainability, An Analysis of the Potential for Formation of ‘Nodes of Persisting Complexity’. You can find the link here and I really encourage you to read it—it’s fascinating, accessible and engaging.

Nodes of persisting complexity

While it’s easy to jump straight to the end to find the winners and losers from Aled and Nick’s research, it’s important that we focus on the system behaviours that they discuss and begin to recognise the complexity of our societies and the long-term impacts of this complexity. It might not grab the headlines, but it might just be the difference between a future we can manage and one that we can’t.

Here are some links to some of the press coverage of their article from around the world:

• The New York Times
• Norway Today
• The Guardian
• Here’s a link to Greta Thunberg’s Twitter, who a lot of our Nick, Aled and a lot of our guests talk about on Insight Faster.

We discuss these topics and more on this episode of Insight Faster.

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To find out more about this subject (or pretty much anything else), or to submit a paper to any of MDPI’s journals, head over to the MDPI website. MDPI is committed to publishing cutting-edge research on sustainability and ensuring it remains accessible to all.

If there’s anything in particular you’d like to hear about on the MDPI Podcast, email me at: jasper.clow@mdpi.com