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1. Sustainable Design of a Reusable Water Bottle: A Systems Thinking Approach

   Basereh Taramsari, H. ; Hoffenson, S. ( March 2023 , Conference on Systems Engineering Research)

   Despite the efforts to increase the pace of sustainable design adaptation in industries, several systemic barriers currently hinder this shift. The design for sustainability methods have been utilized in product design and development phases in many industries. However, they do not have a holistic approach that can capture these systemic drivers and barriers while considering all three pillars of sustainability: environmental, social, and economic. This research proposes a systems thinking approach toward sustainable design that can collectively consider different aspects of the production system in an attempt to resolve the multi-dimensional challenges within the design for sustainability. A reusable water bottle is selected as the case study to illustrate the applications and limitations of this approach. In addition, this case study also helped to define the boundaries and stakeholders involved in the system and reduce the abstractions. The results from this analysis are demonstrated as a causal loop diagram that could be implemented in a system dynamics model to quantitively identify the systematic forces and leverage points driving sustainable design in product development. The comprehensive understanding provided by this analysis revealed many improvement possibilities, trade-offs, and feedback loops within the system that can assist in realizing sustainable product design proliferation and associated positive sustainability outcomes. 

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2. Interdependent Infrastructure as Linked Social, Ecological, and Technological Systems (SETSs) to Address Lock‐in and Enhance Resilience

   https://doi.org/10.1029/2018EF000926  

   Markolf, Samuel A. ; Chester, Mikhail V. ; Eisenberg, Daniel A. ; Iwaniec, David M. ; Davidson, Cliff I. ; Zimmerman, Rae ; Miller, Thaddeus R. ; Ruddell, Benjamin L. ; Chang, Heejun ( December 2018 , Earth's Future)

   Traditional infrastructure adaptation to extreme weather events (and now climate change) has typically been techno‐centric and heavily grounded in robustness—the capacity to prevent or minimize disruptions via a risk‐based approach that emphasizes control, armoring, and strengthening (e.g., raising the height of levees). However, climate and nonclimate challenges facing infrastructure are not purely technological. Ecological and social systems also warrant consideration to manage issues of overconfidence, inflexibility, interdependence, and resource utilization—among others. As a result, techno‐centric adaptation strategies can result in unwanted tradeoffs, unintended consequences, and underaddressed vulnerabilities. Techno‐centric strategies thatlock‐intoday's infrastructure systems to vulnerable future design, management, and regulatory practices may be particularly problematic by exacerbating these ecological and social issues rather than ameliorating them. Given these challenges, we develop a conceptual model and infrastructure adaptation case studies to argue the following: (1) infrastructure systems are not simply technological and should be understood as complex and interconnected social, ecological, and technological systems (SETSs); (2) infrastructure challenges, like lock‐in, stem from SETS interactions that are often overlooked and underappreciated; (3) framing infrastructure with aSETS lenscan help identify and prevent maladaptive issues like lock‐in; and (4) a SETS lens can also highlight effective infrastructure adaptation strategies that may not traditionally be considered. Ultimately, we find that treating infrastructure as SETS shows promise for increasing the adaptive capacity of infrastructure systems by highlighting how lock‐in and vulnerabilities evolve and how multidisciplinary strategies can be deployed to address these challenges by broadening the options for adaptation.

    

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3. Reducing uncertainty of high-latitude ecosystem models through identification of key parameters

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ace637  

   Mevenkamp, Hannah ; Wunderling, Nico ; Bhatt, Uma ; Carman, Tobey ; Friedemann Donges, Jonathan ; Genet, Helene ; Serbin, Shawn ; Winkelmann, Ricarda ; Susanne Euskirchen, Eugenie ( August 2023 , Environmental Research Letters)

   Climate change is having significant impacts on Earth’s ecosystems and carbon budgets, and in the Arctic may drive a shift from an historic carbon sink to a source. Large uncertainties in terrestrial biosphere models (TBMs) used to forecast Arctic changes demonstrate the challenges of determining the timing and extent of this possible switch. This spread in model predictions can limit the ability of TBMs to guide management and policy decisions. One of the most influential sources of model uncertainty is model parameterization. Parameter uncertainty results in part from a mismatch between available data in databases and model needs. We identify that mismatch for three TBMs, DVM-DOS-TEM, SIPNET and ED2, and four databases with information on Arctic and boreal above- and belowground traits that may be applied to model parametrization. However, focusing solely on such data gaps can introduce biases towards simple models and ignores structural model uncertainty, another main source for model uncertainty. Therefore, we develop a causal loop diagram (CLD) of the Arctic and boreal ecosystem that includes unquantified, and thus unmodeled, processes. We map model parameters to processes in the CLD and assess parameter vulnerability via the internal network structure. One important substructure, feed forward loops (FFLs), describe processes that are linked both directly and indirectly. When the model parameters are data-informed, these indirect processes might be implicitly included in the model, but if not, they have the potential to introduce significant model uncertainty. We find that the parameters describing the impact of local temperature on microbial activity are associated with a particularly high number of FFLs but are not constrained well by existing data. By employing ecological models of varying complexity, databases, and network methods, we identify the key parameters responsible for limited model accuracy. They should be prioritized for future data sampling to reduce model uncertainty.

    

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4. The Eco-Techno Spectrum: Exploring Knowledge Systems’ Challenges in Green Infrastructure Management

   https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v6i1.3491  

   Matsler, A. Marissa ; Miller, Thaddeus R. ; Groffman, Peter M. ( January 2021 , Urban Planning)

   null (Ed.)

   Infrastructure crises are not only technical problems for engineers to solve—they also present social, ecological, financial, and political challenges. Addressing infrastructure problems thus requires a robust planning process that includes examination of the social and ecological systems supporting infrastructure, alongside technical systems. An integrative Social, Ecological, and Technological Systems (SETS) analysis of infrastructure solutions can complement the planning process by revealing potential trade-offs that are often overlooked in standard procedures. We explore the interconnected SETS of the infrastructure problem in the US through comparative case studies of green infrastructure (GI) development in Portland and Baltimore. Currently a popular infrastructure solution to a wide variety of urban ills, GI is the use and mimicry of ecological components (e.g., plants) to perform municipal services (e.g., stormwater management). We develop the ecological-technological spectrum—or ‘eco-techno spectrum’—as a framing tool to bridge all three SETS dimensions. The eco-techno spectrum becomes a platform to explore the institutional knowledge system dynamics of GI development where social dimensions are organized across ecological and technological aspects of GI, exposing how governance differs across specific forms of ecological and technological hybridity. In this study, we highlight the knowledge system challenges of urban planning institutions as a key consideration in the realization of innovative infrastructure crisis ‘fixes.’ Disconnected definition and measurement of GI emerge as two distinct challenges across the knowledge systems examined. By revealing and discussing these challenges, we can begin to recognize—and better plan for—gaps in municipal planning knowledge systems, promoting decisions that address the roots of infrastructure crises rather than treating only their symptoms. 

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5. Governing the gaps in water governance and land-use planning in a megacity: The example of hydrological risk in Mexico City

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2018.06.009  

   Lerner, Amy M. ; Eakin, Hallie C. ; Tellman, Elizabeth ; Bausch, Julia Chrissie ; Hernández Aguilar, Bertha ( January 2018 , Cities)

   Megacities are socio-ecological systems (SES) that encompass complex interactions between residents, institutions, and natural resource management. These interactions are exacerbated by climate change as resources such as water become scarce or hazardous through drought and flooding. In order to develop pathways for improved sustainability, the disparate factors that create vulnerable conditions and outcomes must be visible to decision-makers. Nevertheless, for such decision-makers to manage vulnerability effectively, they need to define the salient boundaries of the urban SES, and the relevant biophysical, technological, and socio-institutional attributes that play critical roles in vulnerability dynamics. Here we explore the problem of hydrological risk in Mexico City, where vulnerabilities to flooding and water scarcity are interconnected temporally and spatially, yet the formal and informal institutions and actors involved in the production and management of vulnerability are divided into two discrete problem domains: land-use planning and water resource management. We analyze interviews with city officials working in both domains to understand their different perspectives on the dynamics of socio-hydrological risk, including flooding and water scarcity. We find governance gaps within land-use planning and water management that lead to hydro-social risk, stemming from a failure to address informal institutions that exacerbate vulnerability to flooding and water scarcity. Mandates in both sectors are overlapping and confusing, while socio-hydrological risk is externalized to the informal domain, making it ungoverned. Integrated water management approaches that recognize and incorporate informality are needed to reduce vulnerability to water scarcity and flooding. 

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