Currently, more than half the world's people live in cities, and the global urban population is increasing by about 1.5 per cent per year, according to the WHO. Rapid urbanisation poses specific health challenges, particularly in developing countries, said Dov Jaron, a professor in the school of biomedical engineering, science and health systems, at Drexel University, United States, and an ICSU executive board member.
The major threats to public health — such as heart disease, diabetes and cancers — arise from a combination of behavioural, economic and social factors, all of which interact with biological risk factors, Jaron said. Interactions between these multiple factors do not have a simple linear relationship, and continue "over a lifespan across multiple scales and settings", he added.
Jaron told the Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation for Sustainable Development, which is underway in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that a systems analysis approach that studies interactions between contributing individual factors, would be ideal to tackle such challenges. "Separate analysis of individual factors is insufficient for addressing or predicting the output of complex problems," he told the conference.
But Olive Sishana, president of the International Social Science Council, South Africa, warned that while it was necessary to adopt a systems analysis approach, it was important to be cautious about the validity of the information fed into the model. Science and social disciplines adopt different methods for research and data gathering, and it often becomes difficult to reconcile opposing views on the validity of their respective methods, she said.
The ICSU programme will include multi-disciplinary teams of natural and biomedical scientists, social scientists, engineers, and urban planners. It will also include policymakers as part of the programme, he said.
