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Sustainable development requires new technical solutions to be realized, due to the new approach to production, consumption, and management of resources. These technologies also require technical skills from workers and citizens. These technical abilities are mostly based on the knowledge of mathematics and sciences, acquired during schooling years. In this study, we develop a thermo-economic analysis of sustainable development in relation to the needs of mathematical and technical skills of future workers. To do so, the Education Index is considered to improve it toward a measure of the technical abilities of young people, maintaining its present social meaning of preventing child exploitation. The result is an improvement of the Thermodynamic Human Development Index, by introducing the OECD-PISA assessment, to allow the decision makers to analyze their policies, based on a more comprehensive vision of the present, to better design the future. Finally, we point out the need to focus public policies on the continuous stimulus of intellectual reasoning and on problem-solving-based education to develop the processing capacity and foster the creative capabilities of the younger population that builds the backbone of the future workforce.

The present age is characterized by a very complex economic relationship among finance, technology, social needs, etc., which can be summarized in the word “sustainability.” The sustainable consumption and production policies represent the keys to realize sustainable development. But, the analysis of the carbon footprint data points out that the present economies are still carbon-consumption production. The reduction of greenhouse gasses emissions is based on a shift from fossil to renewable and bio-based industrial raw materials, with a related reorganization of the chains of the energy and manufacturing sectors. But, this requirement implies technological choices based on a sustainable measurement of their impacts on the ecological and economical contexts. So, social and economic requirements must also be taken into account by the decision-makers. Bioeconomy can represent a possible approach to deal with the requirements of the present time. But, new needs emerge in relation to sustainability. So, sustainable policies require new indicators, in order to consider the link among economics, technologies, and social well-being. In this paper, an irreversible thermodynamic approach is developed, in order to introduce a thermoeconomic indicator, based on thermodynamic optimization methods, but also on socioeconomic and ecological evaluations. The entropy production rate is introduced in relation to the CO2 emission flows from human activities, and it is related to the income index, in order to consider the economic and social equity. This approach is of interest of the researchers in the field of econophysics, thermoeconomy, economics, and bioeconomy.

A great variety of natural phenomena follows some statistical distributions. In epidemiology, such as for the current COVID 19 outbreak, it is essential to develop reliable predictions of the evolution of an infectious disease. In particular, a statistical projection of the time of maximum diffusion of infected carriers is fundamental in order to prepare healthcare systems and organize a robust public health response. In this paper, we develop a thermodynamic approach based on the infection statistics related to the total citizenry of a country. It represents a novel tool for evaluating the time of maximum diffusion of an epidemic or pandemic.