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The design of adaptation strategies that promote urban health and well-being in the face of climate change requires an understanding of the feedback interactions that take place between the dynamical state of a city, the health of its people, and the state of the planet. Complexity, contingency and uncertainty combine to impede the growth of such systemic understandings. In this paper we suggest that the collaborative development of conceptual models can help a group to identify potential leverage points for effective adaptation. We describe a three-step procedure that leads from the development of a high-level system template, through the selection of a problem space that contains one or more of the group’s adaptive challenges, to a specific conceptual model of a sub-system of importance to the group. This procedure is illustrated by a case study of urban dwellers’ maladaptive dependence on private motor vehicles. We conclude that a system dynamics approach, revolving around the collaborative construction of a set of conceptual models, can help communities to improve their adaptive capacity, and so better meet the challenge of maintaining, and even improving, urban health in the face of climate change.

Knowledge that has been developed through extensive experience of receiving and responding to ecological feedback is particularly valuable for informing and guiding environmental management. This paper captures the implicit understanding of seven experienced on-ground conservation managers about the conservation issues affecting the Ramsar listed Macquarie Marshes in New South Wales, Australia. Multiple interviews, a workshop, and meetings were used to elicit the manager's knowledge. The managers suggest that the Macquarie Marshes are seriously threatened by a lack of water, and immediate steps need to be taken to achieve more effective water delivery. Their knowledge and perceptions of the wider societal impediments to achieving more effective water delivery have also led the managers to suggest that there may be system feedbacks that are reinforcing the tendency for water agencies to favor the short-term interests of the irrigation industry. Although the managers clearly have certain personal interests that influence their understanding and perceptions, much of their knowledge also appears to have been heavily influenced by their ecological understanding of the wetland's dynamics. This paper highlights that although all stakeholders clearly need to be involved in making decisions about conservation and how resources should be used, such decisions should not be confused with the need for consulting people with the appropriate ecological expertise to help determine the degree to which an ecological system is threatened, the likely ecological causes of the threats, and actions that may be needed to restore and maintain a functional ecosystem.

Rapid, human‐induced global change presents major challenges to researchers, policy‐makers and land managers. Addressing these challenges requires an appreciation of the dynamics of ecological systems. Here, we propose ‘landscape fluidity’ as a perspective and research agenda from which to consider landscapes in the process of changing rapidly through both time and space. We define landscape fluidity as the ebb and flow of different organisms within a landscape through time. A range of existing ideas, themes and practical approaches are relevant to landscape fluidity, and we use a case study of scattered tree landscapes in south‐eastern Australia to illustrate the benefits of a landscape fluidity perspective. We suggest that a focus on landscape fluidity can bring a renewed emphasis on change in landscapes and so help unify a range of currently separate research themes in biogeography, ecology, palaeoecology and conservation biology.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to take steps towards a life cycle assessment that is able to account for changes over time in resource flows and environmental impacts. The majority of life cycle inventory (LCI) studies assume that computation parameters are constants or fixed functions of time. This assumption limits the opportunities to account for temporal effects because it precludes consideration of the dynamics of the product system. Methods System dynamics methods are used in a consequential, fleet-based LCI that accounts for some aspects of the dynamics of the wider system. The LCI model compares the life-cycle energy consumption of car bodyin-whites (BIWs) in Australia made from steel and aluminium. It incorporates two dynamic processes: the flow of BIWs into and out of the fleet, and the recycling of aluminium from end-of-life BIWs back into new BIW production. The dynamical model computes both productbased and fleet-based estimates. Results and discussion The product-based computations suggest that an aluminium BIW consumes less energy than a steel BIW over a single life cycle. The fleet-based computations suggest that the energy benefits of aluminium BIWs do not begin to emerge for some time. The substitution of aluminium for steel is a low-leverage intervention that changes the values of a few parameters of the system. The system has a delayed, damped response to this intervention because the large stock of BIWs is a source of high inertia, and the long useful life leads to a slow decay of steel BIWs out of the fleet. The recycling of aluminium back into BIW production is a moderate-leverage intervention that initially strengthens a reinforcing feedback loop, driving a rapid accumulation of energy benefits. Dominance then shifts to a balancing loop, slowing the accumulation of energy benefits. Both interventions result in a measureable reduction in life-cycle energy consumption, but only temporarily divert the underlying growth trend.Conclusions The results suggest that product-based LCIs overestimate the short-term energy benefits of aluminium by not accounting for the time required for the stock of preexisting steel components to decay out of the fleet, and underestimate the long-term energy benefits of aluminium components by not accounting for changes in the availability of recycled aluminium. The results also suggest that interventions such as lightweighting and other efficiency measures alone can slow the growth of energy consumption, but are probably inadequate to achieve sustainable energy consumption levels if the fleet is large.

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