Thinking Outside the Lab: Understanding Complex Systems is Key to Tackling Climate Change

Clean technologies, renewable energy, and circular materials flow are key in the Blue Economy and there is a historic and urgent need for scientists and engineers to be deeply involved to develop products and services. However, there are multiple challenges within the academic and technical communities to be addressed including a decline in disruptive science and technology that could provide innovative solutions, a deficiency in cross-disciplinary skills to enable broad contributions to the conversation, and a lack of voices from industries that are designing, building, and deploying blue technology at scale. In this paper, we offer suggestions to address these challenges.