Extreme weather events, the emergence of infectious diseases, climate change, food-security and cybersecurity issues are some of the major challenges identified for the next decade, in the 2022 Global Risks report. These grand challenges require multidisciplinary approaches to be addressed, but the fundamental nature of the biophysical, physical, and environmental systems that define them calls physics of data to play a leading role, particularly in light of the digital transformation of many processes and the availability of large masses of data in so many areas that are the basis for then developing predictive models and analyses.