How Science Can Help Build a Resilient World

As the town of Lindau gears up for one of its biggest annual traditions, so are the people of South Asia. Every June, the summer monsoon strikes the south west coast of India, and continues to provide the region with most of its annual rainfall over just the next three months. Naturally, it has been described as the “life blood” of these nations, relieving citizens from the intense summer heat, replenishing groundwater, and powering their predominantly agricultural economies. A below average monsoon can be disastrous, resulting in widespread droughts such as those in 1987, 1972, 2002 and 2009. Unfortunately, this year’s monsoon is slated to be an underperforming one. The good news is that this time, people were warned about it as early as in April.

Due to the mindboggling mixture of parameters that determine it, climate is a classic example of what physicists know as a ‘complex system’. Consequently, it is extremely tricky, especially in the moody tropics, to accurately predict what the weather will be like on a particular day, or even when the monsoon will strike. On the other hand, long-term climate forecasts is now possible thanks to the development of climate modelling by scientists such as Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi who shared a Nobel Prize in Physics “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming” in 2021. Precisely forecasting a single year’s monsoons is still incredibly challenging and even with climate modelling fuelled by modern supercomputers, national meteorological departments don’t always get it right. But they are able to anticipate, and communicate timely warnings to people, industries and governments. In times like these, being prepared can be what separates catastrophe from resilience.

One of the key themes that will be explored during the 75^th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting (#LINO75) is resilience, a quality that is not just desirable but imperative for survival in a fractured and rapidly changing world. There is no universal definition, but resilience is broadly understood as the capacity to recover. Climate change, epidemics, food and fuel crises, war, natural disasters and geopolitical tensions are some of the realities various parts of today’s world are grappling with. Many of these are already happening or are inevitable, so what can help is designing infrastructure, planning resource usage and evolving lifestyles to mitigate the damage and bounce back from the shocks and transitions. In short, being resilient. Resilience means being able to anticipate, withstand, adapt to, and recover from major challenges. At every one of these stages, science can contribute.

Fact, Fiction and a Friendly World

It is impossible to talk about science and resilience, without recalling the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in 2020, it felt as if the world was hurtling into catastrophe. A vaccine could save the day, but these usually take decades to develop and commercialize. This time, however, scientists had an edge. A new technology called mRNA vaccines had entered the scene just about a decade ago and it gave the world two of the fastest approved and most effective COVID-19 vaccines in a very short time. The scientific discoveries made by scientists such as laureates Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman ended up saving millions of lives and helped end the deadly pandemic. Beyond that, the vaccines enabled the world to find its feet again, slowly recover socially and economically, and offered individuals and institutions the opportunity to build more resilient systems for potential future health crises.

So can science really save the world? It is far-fetched to imagine an astronauts-versus-asteroid scenario like in the film Armageddon (1998), but Hollywood recently offered a more nuanced and realistic scenario in Project Hail Mary (2026). In this film, based on a science fiction novel of the same name, a high-school science teacher saves the planet from a dimming sun using scientific thinking, experimentation, a whole lot of humanity and political will. It’s notable, however, that Earth is not “saved” in the way of traditional happy endings. Science takes time, and in this case, it took 20+ years for the protagonist to identify the problem, invent a solution and communicate it back to his home planet. By then, it’s likely that a big chunk of the world population would have lost their lives. Just as it was with the pandemic, things will never be the same again, but there may be hope for humanity yet.

A dimming sun is not one of our current dilemmas, but in the late 20th century, we were in fact confronted with a thinning ozone layer. The layer of ozone molecules around our atmosphere is critical to what makes Earth liveable, so it came as a shocker in 1974 when Laureates Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland published a study showing that chlorofluorocarbon gases–used widely as refrigerants, propellants, in spray bottles and plastic foams–were rapidly depleting it. Their discovery resulted in the Montreal Protocol which in 1987 became the first international treaty in the history of the United Nations to achieve universal ratification. The protocol led to the phasing out of these dangerous gases and the ongoing recovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica. Today, it serves as an example of how far-reaching the impact of international cooperation can be.

Cooperation amidst conflict

Cross-border collaborations had also come to the fore in the 1950s and 1960s when American biologist Norman Borlaug pioneered what is now called the Green Revolution. Countries such as Mexico, India and Pakistan were grappling with the issue of insufficient food for their growing populations, so Borlaug recommended to them improved methods of cultivation and new strains of crops such as dwarf wheat which were more robust and high yielding. Indeed these efforts by Borlaug and his collaborators around the world helped tackle rural poverty for a while, but it also introduced several problems: the uncontrolled use of harmful chemicals as fertilizers and pesticides, increased consumption of freshwater, air pollution caused by the yearly burning of agricultural waste which becomes necessary with back-to-back crop cycles and the extinction of indigenous varieties of crops.

Moreover, today it is crystal clear to everyone in the world that food insecurity is not just an issue of demand and supply. “Global food and nutrition insecurity is increasing despite broadly stable supplies of major staples,” states the World Bank. “Conflict and climate shocks continue to be the primary drivers of acute food insecurity.” Whether it is the deadly conflict in West Asia that has blocked the Hormuz Strait, or the super El Nino poised to heat up the world and weaken monsoons, scientists, economists and policymakers are realizing now that they need to join hands to solve world hunger in a sustainable and inclusive way.

As the Green Revolution highlights, science has the capacity to harm (even if unintentionally) just as much as it can save. Nobel Laureates, led by Otto Hahn and Max Born, recognized this fact way back during the 5^th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1955 when they drafted and signed the Mainau Declaration on Nuclear Weapons. “With pleasure we have devoted our lives to the service of science. It is, we believe, a path to a happier life for people. We see with horror that this very science is giving mankind the means to destroy itself,” the declaration stated.  In 2024, once again, Laureates convened to sign a second declaration on this topic reiterating their warnings to the world about the existential threat posed by nuclear war. 

So perhaps the right question is not “Can science save the world?” but “Can science build a resilient world?” This is something that will be addressed at the 75^th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. Nobel Laureates and Young Scientists from various disciplines will join forces to lead a panel discussion on global health, a debate on food security and talks on fighting diseases in the 21^st century. With ‘Resilience’ as one of its key themes, the meeting this year is set to be the site of numerous conversations, both on and off stage, on how knowledge as well as education, responsibility, and cooperation can transform vulnerability into collective strength.