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Tourism offers many economic benefits but can have long-lasting ecological effects when improperly managed. Tourism can cause overwhelming pressure on wastewater treatment systems, as in Belize, where some of the over 400 small islands (cayes) that were once temporary sites for fishermen have become popular tourist destinations. An overabundance of nitrogen, in part as a result of incomplete wastewater treatment, threatens human health and ecosystem services. The tourism industry is a complex and dynamic industry with many sectors and stakeholders with conflicting goals. In this study, a systems thinking approach was adopted to study the dynamic interactions between stakeholders and the environment at Laughing Bird Caye National Park in Belize. The project centered on nutrient discharges from the caye’s onsite wastewater treatment system. An archetype analysis approach was applied to frame potential solutions to nutrient pollution and understand potential behaviors over time. “Out of control” and “Underachievement” were identified as system archetypes; “Shifting the Burden” and ‘‘Limits to Success’’ were used to model specific cases. Based on these results, upgrading of the wastewater treatment system should be performed concurrently with investments in the user experience of the toilets, education on the vulnerability of the treatment system and ecosystem, and controls on the number of daily tourists. 

In 2019, interdisciplinary teams of anthropology and environmental engineering PhD students went to Placencia Village, Belize to study stakeholder-driven issues related to coastal resilience. Our team explored wastewater management on a few of the more than 400 small cayes peppering the Belize Barrier Reef. These islands have transitioned from temporary sites for overnight fishers to crowded tourism destinations. Wastewater management has struggled to keep pace with these changes, spurring concerns about the health of the reef. Our task was to construct contextualized system dynamic models which would be useful to those concerned. Along the way however, we ran into tensions related to the underlying logic, and representations of people, in mathematical descriptions of social and technical configurations. This article lays out the context and lessons learned from our encounter with interdisciplinary systems modeling.