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The idea of planetary boundaries sets limits for a safe operating space for humanity and offers a guide for tackling global sustainability challenges. But staying within these limits requires understanding how globally interconnected social, environmental, and technological systems behave when decisions are made with incomplete information. Here, we draw on the notions of observability and controllability from modern control theory, an engineering approach to steering complex systems, to show how decision-makers can act in real time without perfect models or full knowledge. Our analysis illustrates a natural mapping of design parameters onto real-world policy decisions and highlights how to manage the interplay between past, real-time, and projected information to improve the controllability, and thus the sustainability, of social-ecological-technical systems. Modern control theory can help address the challenge of designing real-time policy action when confronted with limited knowledge and information. Looking at three sustainability challenges shows how monitoring a system and guiding its outcomes can work together in policy design.
Anderies et al. (Fri,) studied this question.