Societies and Trust in Science

The crisis we face is a crisis of the authority of knowledge: who produces it, whose counts, and whether science and shared facts can still ground collective response. This strain comes at a critical moment: trust in science has declined since the pandemic, grown politically polarized, and in many countries become a target of open attack on scientists, funding and institutions. The real question is no longer whether people trust science, but whether societies can still agree on the pathways needed to act on complex, long-term threats.

Since COVID19 health is particularly affected by these developments. Pandemics and disease patterns follow dense webs of influence: equity, living and working conditions, industry marketing, and increasingly the algorithms shaping what we eat, buy and believe. Planetary health — where human wellbeing, biodiversity and climate are inseparably linked — is the clearest example of this complexity. AI offers unprecedented power and potential to make sense of these complex systems, yet it’s also part of the problem: a black box driving decisions, reproducing structural exclusion based on skewed datasets, fueling the attention economy, and accelerating misinformation. Generative AI-powered social media can spread falsehoods faster than science can correct them. Simple, single-cause explanations are easier to convey but can mislead; messages that stay faithful to complexity risk sounding evasive. Both paths erode trust often reinforced through lack of inclusion. This session tackles these interlocking issues — complexity, AI, planetary health, and the fight for trust — and asks: what will it take to rebuild the relationship between science and society?