Systems Thinking and Climate Change

This week’s reading got me thinking about how the characteristics of systems can interact to affect a systems function or purpose. I work part-time at a company called the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition (ISET), located in the Sustainability Innovation Lab at Colorado (SILC). ISET works on a variety of projects helping local, regional and national governments plan for the future impacts of climate change.

Hierarchy, self-organization and resilience all are key components in our work. Many communities are seeking to increase their resilience in the face of climate change. This is unsurprising, as resilience is defined as “a system’s ability to survive and persist within a variable environment” (Meadows, 76). Increasing variation in temperature, precipitation, and extreme weather events resulting from climate change creates uncertainty in a variety of key areas, including food security, public health, and water scarcity. This means that communities must be ready to respond and adapt to sudden and long-term changes.

Systems thinking is essential in thinking about community resilience. Understanding the hierarchy of communities aggregating to the city, regional, and national scale can help the systems thinker understand the underlying cause of problems facing the community. It is also vital to understand how the community fits into its natural and built environments. For example, if a community’s water source is located downstream of a sewage treatment plant that overflows during severe storms, then the community’s resilience is decreased, since they are less able to respond to other storm impacts without access to clean water. The water treatment facility may be located in another city, which did not consider the consequences of building a sewage treatment plant upriver from the community in question. Meadows points out that “In hierarchical systems relationships within each subsystem are denser and stronger than relationships between subsystem” (Meadows, 83). Thus, it may be better to create ordinances regulating the siting of facilities upstream at the regional or national level, rather than relying on the community’s ability to prevent construction of sewage treatment plants upstream.

The ability to self-organize can also be important in a community ability to adapt and respond to climate change. Say the severe storm in the previous example floods the roads, preventing emergency supplies from reaching the community. A community that is able to create a system to share local resources until the roads are cleared will be more successful than one where the most impacted individuals must fend for themselves.

Question: What system traps might be identified in efforts to address climate change? How might we turn these into system opportunities?

Comments

[Cody Janousek]

Resiliency is one of the most valid reasons for switching to more amounts of renewable energy on the grid. You mentioned a storm leaving a community vulnerable to not receiving their supplies and electricity is a commonly affected resource by storms and strong weather. If the supply of coal or natural gas is blocked from reaching a power plant it has few options for resiliency. Although renewable energy's fuel is wind and sunlight, which opponents point to as problems due to indeterminacy,this is a strength when it comes to resiliency.

[Cody Janousek]

I wish I could edit my post... I should have mentioned that some of those arguments are for distributed generation using renewable energy rather than the broad category of renewable energy.

[Sam Krasnobrod]

I completely agree with your premise that systems thinking is necessary way to look at not only large-scale issues such as climate change, but also community issues. In the qualitative methods class we discussed the 2013 floods, and how communities dealt with the aftermath. In one town, Lyons I believe, the flood knocked out the cities power. Within a few days the USFS responded with a quick solution, one not meant to serve as a long-term fix, but as something that could be put in place in one day. The reason for the rushed solution was not only in response to the lack of power, but also because the following day was the "government shutdown". The result was a power line draped directly on the canopy of pine and aspen trees. Is this a fire hazard? Good question, and it is hard to say. Regardless the line remains.

The approach the USFS took to provide power is understandable given the circumstance, however it is not a resilient option. The better (hindsight is 20/20 after all!) would have been for the town of Lyons to have a secondary power line from another city, or from another source to make sure that lights stay on even during a flood... wait, maybe that isn't a good idea?