Modeling risk in complex bioeconomies

Like all bioeconomies, markets in synthetic biology will reconfigure complex arrangements of coupled social, technological, and biogeophysical systems. These rearrangements will create novel pathways for risks to propagate across and through systems that will be difficult if not impossible to predict or analyze using conventional risk assessment paradigms. To anticipate potential risks, new approaches will be needed to model cross-system dynamics, using methods that successfully integrate and synthesize diverse forms of knowledge about quantifiable and non-quantifiable features of multiple systems and to ensure early phase innovations are sufficiently transparent to assess the broad system reconfigurations associated with new market development.