SYSTEMS ENGINEERING APPLIED TO MAJOR SOCIETAL CHALLENGES

Major societal challenges such as climate change, pandemic response, and global access to healthcare are, at their core, global systems challenges. Solutions to address these challenges require overarching systems analyses and perspectives. Working as a component of a vast array of multi- disciplinary experts, systems engineers will, by 2035, bring an increasingly wider systems thinking perspective and perform modeling, simulation, and tradeoff analysis to supplement the corresponding activities of the scientific community.

As highlighted in the example above from the World Wildlife Fund, climate change impacts the global systems environment that we live in, with many interwoven and interdependent system elements. Systems engineers can help analyze the interactions among natural and human systems as they contribute to the global environment and inform the development of mitigation approaches that recognize the tradeoffs in feasibility, cost and benefits informing the development of public policy.