Complexity of Couple Human Environment Systems

In our previous lecture, we were introduced to the concept of sustainable development, what it means and what its components are. A key factor in sustainable development is the fact that we must manage many factors in tandem with each other. Managing only a single issue, whether it be economical, social or environmental in isolation from the others, can create issues. Our world, and our interaction between human and natural systems necessitate us to address the essential complexity of those interactions, recognizing that understanding the individual components of nature–society systems provides insufficient understanding about the behavior of the systems themselves.
A key concept of not only systems, but particularly of coupled human and environment systems is that of interdependence. Interdependence is a relation between its members such that each is mutually dependent on the others. This concept differs from a simple dependence relation, which implies that one member of the relationship can't function or survive apart from the other(s). With such interdependence, complexity emerges.

Complexity

The world is a complex, adaptive systems that has multiple interconnections and many equilibrium states, that changes discontinuously, predictability is highly limited, sometimes impossible. Predictability is also further challenged when working on long spatial and temporal dimensions, which are the scales we care about for sustainability. Four dimensions of Complex Adaptive Systems that assure a system’s maintenance and adaptiveness:

1. Space
2. Time
3. Energy
4. Information, especially in the form of feedback loops

If you don’t consider how things are connected, your solutions are likely to become sources of new problems and unintended consequences.

Our Mind

A world rife with complexity, however, is a challenge to our “tiny” minds. Human minds are built to put up barriers to complexity and cause us to reject what we are hearing if it seems too extreme. As such, most human minds are fundamentally at odds with complexity and sustainability. Our minds have been created in an unsustainable way and could be characterized in four different ways – the biological mind, the historical mind, the contemporary mind, and the psychodynamic mind.

Figure 1: Our mind

Our brains are hard wired in a very similar to our ancestors – the apes. Our neocortex is programmed for survival, particularly in the short term. This is often referred to as the biological mind.
The scientific revolution in Europe brought us the scientific mind, where humans view themselves as separate from nature and as such, see nature as something that can be dominated – the scientific mind.
Most people in North America are bombarded everyday with ~42 minutes of advertising each day with one message, that happiness comes from consumption. As such, the contemporary mind is preoccupied with growth, consumption and a search to resolve problems by “creating” something to fix it.
Finally, Sigmund Freud regularly discussed in his work the conception of our psychodynamic mind, where humans reject that which is difficult to handle or comprehend. As such, most people may simply ignore the uncertainty or instability that lays ahead of us if we don’t begin to act or interact with natural systems in a more sustainable way.

Scientific Revolution

Looking back to the Scientific revolution, leading thinkers (e.g., Copernicus, Galileo, DesCartes, Newton) believed that to understand our world or things, we needed to reduce it to its individual parts. But, by taking a holistic view, one realizes that the whole or a system does not equate to a summation of its individual parts. Systems have emergent properties. These properties are not within its individual parts, but emerge from them and their interaction and interdependence between them. This is where anthropocentrism – the view that the world exists for us, humans – falls short. When we interpret the world in ways that it helps humans and not our interdependence with the systems in which we interact and exist.

Figure 2: The Scientific Revolution

Shifting our Mindset - Five Minds for the Future

Many leading academics are researching the mental qualities and skills that will be needed in the future. Considering the complexity, non-linearity, and uncertainty that we face moving into the future, it is recommended that people shift their mindset that better handles this sort of challenging world. To be a successful person in the future, the most important thing will be for people to have a synthetic, holistic, systemic mind. These thinkers will know how to put disciplines together, understand and manage complexity, and think in a more holistic manner. It is suggested that through technological advances and the speed of technological change, our “left brain” or more analytical activities could be performed by machines or robots. As such, one can’t depend on having a successful career by relying on an analytical mind. “Right-brain” experience, skills and minds will be key to ensuring success. This is why this course provides you with more cross / trans-disciplinary content.
Five Minds for our Future or just ways of thinking and acting that can best manage and succeed in our uncertain, non-linear future are:

• The Disciplined Mind: Can master information within major disciplines that are challenging to learn and require practice (as the human brain is not pre-wired to understand intuitively).
• The Synthesizing Mind: Able to sort out what is important and what is not from the massive amount of available information, and can convey it to others when she needs to do so.
• The Creating Mind: Prepared to think outside the box to allow for innovation or meaningful change in how problems are approached.
• The Ethical Mind: Actively reflects about one’s behavior, inquiring about what can be done to ensure work is excellent in quality and ethical in conduct, and then follows through with those responsibilities.
• The Respectful Mind: Fosters respectfulness, not just tolerance of differences, and emotional and interpersonal intelligence that allows for and embraces a diversity of perspectives.

Gardner, Howard. “Five Minds for the Future”, Harvard Business Review Press, First Edition, April 3, 2007

What is a System?

“An interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized around some purpose.” - Dana Meadows
A system is a dynamic and complex whole, with several distinctive characteristics:

What is Systems Thinking?

“A discipline for seeing wholes…a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots” - Peter Senge
Systems thinking is the process of understanding how one component of a system can influence another within a system (or potentially other interdependent systems). It is a disciple for seeing and understanding the whole rather than its parts. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships over parts, providing us with the ability to patterns of change over time rather than just a snapshot in time. This is opposite to our more traditional way of thinking through mechanistic cognition.

In the context of our natural world, we could look at an ecosystem which is made up of a variety of elements such as air, water, movement, plants, and animals, but with a systems view, one will recognize that these individual elements work together to survive or perish. What are some other examples of ways we can think in systems. Examples include organizations (consisting of people, structures, and processes that work together to make an organization healthy or unhealthy), or, as we discussed in class our climate (driven by a number of environmental, economic and social factors that will either support or degrade our global climate).
Unlike typical linear thinking or problem solving, systems thinking is an approach to problem solving where one views "problems" as parts of an overall system, rather than reacting to a single / specific part (disregarding how it impacts or is impacted by interdependent parts), outcome or event. Systems thinking is a framework where we believe that we can best understand the component parts of a system in the context of relationships with each other and with other systems, rather than in isolation.
The list of benefits is long. A condensed list of benefits of systems thinking was listed in class (below), in addition to the benefits implied earlier in these lecture notes, such as being a key skills to be successful in the future.

Figure 3: Benefits of Systems Thinking

Systems thinking is a language, but also a set of methods / tools
Within the discipline of systems thinking, there are many tools that can be employed to understand, describe and simulate systems. One that we want students to become familiar with is causal loop mapping (CLM) – a qualitative tool used at the front-end of understand and analyzing a system. It doesn’t deal with non-linearity and non-linear differential equations as other tools like agent-based modeling may, but does allow us to depict how system components are interconnected and the relationship between them.
In all worlds, there are two kinds of causal loops, Reinforcing and Balancing. These are foundational structures of systems thinking, and most of life is a mixture of reinforcing and balancing loops.

Reinforcing Loops: A reinforcing loop is one in which an action produces a result which influences more of the same action thus resulting in growth or decline. They are characterized by positive feedbacks that create either vicious or virtuous circles.

If a reinforcing structure is producing a desirable result it is generally referred to as a virtuous cycle. When this happens there is a tendency to ignore it and let it go. This is a mistake, as nothing grows forever. When everything is going just they way you want it to that's the best time to be concerned about how to ensure it continues going the way you want it to.

When a reinforcing structure is producing an undesirable result it is generally referred to as a viscous cycle. The best way to deal with a viscous cycle is to find a way to break one of the feedback loops so the structure can no longer reinforce itself (http://www.systems-thinking.org/theWay/sre/re.htm).

Balancing Loops: A balancing loop attempts to move some current state (the way things are) to a desired state (goal or objective) though some action (whatever is done to reach the goal). Characterized by negative feedbacks that balance out a system, an example of a balancing system would be the human body. A balancing loop is representative of any situation where there is a goal or an objective and action is taken to achieve that goal or objective (http://www.systems-thinking.org/theWay/sba/ba.htm).

Take the Population Growth Self Test

Reading Causal Loop Maps
In addition to making a connecting from one component of a system to another, a standard labeling scheme is employed to indicate the interaction / relationship between factors.

State of the World

Figure 4: State of the World

Based on reading the most recent literature on the state of the world, six big challenges emerge: Climate, Water, Ecosystems, Population, Poverty and Urbanization. But, what is most important to remember about these challenges is that they all interact. For example, the “dry lands” of the world occupy 40% of land surfaces, is occupied by 4 billion predominantly poor individuals with high fertility rates, and only live with 8% of the world’s freshwater. In addition to the interconnectedness of these global challenges, climate change serves as a threat multiplier to these challenges. In addition to these state of the world studies, innumerable additional studies are pointing to climate change as being central to contributing to the instability of our world and are trying to figure out what areas of the world will be most susceptible to change and what sort of change will take place.

Managing in our Complex System
We need to forge a new ethic for managing our relationship with nature. This ethic should begin with three basic principles

1. Nature is a system of unfathomable complexity. It is important to err on the side of minimal disruption whenever possible
2. Nature gives away nothing for free.
3. Nature has no reset button

Climate Change alone is a great example of how complex our system is and how we must learn to manage our relationship within other systems (e.g., natural world) rather than try to manage them directly.
Climate change characterized, by high levels of instability, tipping points (non-linear transitions where a small change can make a big difference), tele-connections (recurring and persistent large-scale patterns) and feedbacks. Based on what we know about systems, “Climate change is best viewed as a threat multiplier which exacerbates existing trends, tensions and instability” (“Climate Change and International Security” European Union, March 14, 2008). As such, we must no longer delay interventions to subdue the threat that climate change puts on this world.

Take the Systems Thinking Self Test