Chemistry plays a crucial role in making modern life possible. Yet the scale of the chemistry carried out by 7.4 billion people has both beneficial and destructive impacts on our planet and its people. Several global interdisciplinary science initiatives compellingly highlight the rate of change of chemical parameters that track our planetary life support systems. Does our current chemistry educational practice rest comfortably in isolation on a quiet holme, while the swelling tributaries of social and planetary change sweep by off-shore? Or can we re-imagine curriculum and pedagogy changes that will more adequately equip our students for the increasing complexity and uncertainty they will face in their lives as scientists, professionals, and citizens on a rapidly changing planet? We report progress to date on an international initiative to reorient the practice of chemistry education toward systems thinking, and to re-imagine how chemistry could more visibly address multiple emerging global challenges. The initiative draws in part on the 2016 analysis in Nature Chemistry, “<i>One World Chemistry and Systems Thinking</i>,” (Matlin, Mehta, Hopf and Krief - all affiliated with IOCD, the International Organization for Chemical Sciences in Development), that presents a bold call for the practice and overarching mission of chemistry and chemistry education to receive a major overhaul to be fit for the 21<sup>st</sup> Century and beyond.

No Holme is an island: Systems thinking in chemistry education

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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