Research

The world population has surpassed 7 billion and is projected to grow to 9 billion or more by 2043. This poses several challenges to sustainability, including increasing pressure on ecosystems, rising economic inequalities, migrations, aging populations, and unsustainable rates of urbanization. As the dominant species on the planet, humans have now become the prime target for new pathogens, or for old ones with increased resistance to our defense systems.

These challenges are of a new nature and require the development of novel approaches that integrate disciplines such as demography, economics, social sciences, biology, and epidemiology with modeling methods typical of quantitative sciences, such as applied mathematics, complex systems physics, and Data Science.

This integration is now possible thanks to growing access to quantitative data on human, social, and economic phenomena. This has enabled the development of Computational Social Science and allows tackling global issues with the same methods.

The recent Covid-19 pandemic has made clear how humans have become a fundamental variable in addressing global challenges. Mitigating humanity’s future challenges depends crucially on whether and how we can integrate demographic projections with the mechanisms of our economies and human mobility to predict the impact these can have on our environment.

This project aims to contribute to the birth and development of this new science, which we call Human Ecology, through the creation of an interdisciplinary Research Group, in synergy with other research lines of the project.