Bounce Forward: The future of resilience for Australians
Dr Tim Bainbridge
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has provided a critical insight into the importance of social determinants of health, particularly the complexity of changing human behaviour en masse. For example, wearing a mask is a simple individual behaviour that works most effectively when high numbers of the population adopt it. Yet, mask wearing had a slow adoption in multiple countries that was likely influenced by social (conformity) and individual factors (being pro-social). The future will likely bring multiple global-level challenges, like COVID-19, where collective timely uptake of new behaviours or technologies will be needed to ensure lower economic and mortality costs.
The ‘bounce forward’ concept would aim to future-proof against oncoming global-level challenges (e.g., new infectious diseases, food security issues, climate change, climate disasters, fundamental changes in the food supply) through identifying key factors predictive of widescale adaptive behavioural responses (e.g., mask-wearing or vaccine acceptance during a pandemic). The project will use techniques such as agent-based modelling to understand dynamic human interactions and the spread of information and its influence on behaviour.
During the project, a model of human action that broadly matches observed behaviour through the pandemic and/or other challenges (e.g., climate change) will be developed. With this model as a guide, the goals of the project are to (a) identify factors that are highly important for timely, appropriate, population-wide responses to challenges and (b) propose interventions that may effectively boost (or suppress, as appropriate) these factors.
Project lead: Dr Tim Bainbridge
Find out more: Building resilience through action: modelling public responses to global health challenges – Responsible Innovation FSP