Swiss researchers aim to keep a lid on crises

The team will be working from the new Competence Centre, which has opened at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich after securing CHF1.25 million (US$1.22 million) in funding.

They propose finding ways of preventing events such as the global financial meltdown or rising oil prices, instead of simply managing them once they occur.

Dirk Helbing, a professor leading the center, says the study of modern social science is usually focused on a crisis-free and balanced society, and the team aims to fill a current void in the research of societal patterns during extreme events.

The center will be pioneering a new technique that combines socio-economic, natural science, engineering, empirical and experimental approaches.

Helbing told swissinfo that this cross-disciplinary method reflects the inter-related nature of today's problems.

"You just need to open the newspapers everyday to see that there are a lot of different crises going on at any single instance of time," he said.

"By trying to improve a situation we may cause a series of other problems. This is exactly what this centre is about, trying to understand those complex interactions and put them into models."

For example, Helbing says the issue of global food shortages is connected to the problem of dwindling fuel supplies, as agricultural land is being exploited to develop agrofuels which in turn are used to reduce CO2 emissions. Food shortages can then lead to conflict and migration, he explains.

Crises scenarios

"Basically the social sciences should get into a position of making bigger contributions in this direction, to give more useful advice to politicians and business at the time when it is needed," Helbing said.

The first issues the center will address will be how conflicts arise, crises in the financial markets and problems in infrastructure such as transport and traffic congestion.

It aims to collect empirical data of crises scenarios and study alternatives, and determine the degree of predictability and risks of social crises.

The findings would then be shared with the wider community and presented through think tanks, visiting professorships, supervision of PhD students and organization of colloquia and workshops. The team also plans to use the internet to enable faster publication of results.

"One of the problems in social systems is that there is only one realization of the world, and you cannot experiment with it. This is different from physics or chemistry or biology where you can set up all sorts of conditions and see what happens," Helbing said.

"As we can't do such experiments in real life and nevertheless need to know what happens, and why it happens, we need to carry out experiments on computers. This makes it possible to study 'what would happen if.'"