ABSTRACT
Human health issues can be approached from two perspectives; a short term perspective focused on issues of immediate concern such as diseases and malnourishment, and a longer term perspective that considers the root causes of those problems. So far, in a stable climatic environment, it was suffi cient to remain focused on the “here and now”. Indeed, the relatively stable climate of the past allowed humanity to grow in size and complexity. Thanks to increases in food productivity, human societies became “superorganisms” that were “lubricated by water”, whose increasing complexity was managed by “importing” increased amounts of energy into the “system”, and developing increasingly effi cient methods to transmit it, from work animals and water power, to coal and oil powering steam and diesel engines. However, the current climate change poses longer term challenges as it risks undermining such complex systems, and expected water shortages could easily exacerbate the health of populations, by magnifying the effect of food crises, and facilitating disease transmission. Rather than providing a hedge against a crisis, trade networks could then simply transmit local problems globally. To understand how those problems are transmitted, the interaction between societal complexity, energy demands, and water management needs to be investigated insofar
as its relevance on group health. Such an investigation will need to rely on a rigorous classifi cation of the various types of uncertainty that our societies currently face. This will allow it to become an essential component of future decision making, which will have to balance the need to solve immediate issues and the vital necessity to understand the risks of various potential future outcomes by factoring in our partial understanding of natural processes.
