Managing and Sustaining the Coupled Water-Land-Food Systems in the Context of Global Change: How Qualitative System Dynamic Modelling Can Assist in Understanding and Designing High-Leverage Interventions

Abstract

The water-land-food system is essential for sustaining the basic human needs. While the demand for these resources is increasing rapidly, their sustainability has been hampered by a plethora of challenges, including rapid population growth, climate change, land-use change, and land degradation. To attain a sustainable supply and efficiently manage these resources, interactions between all resources and the factors constraining/sustaining them need to be understood. In this chapter, four systems archetypes based on grounded in the systems thinking framework and system dynamics approach were employed to explore and identify the key system drivers, factors, and processes that influence the behaviour and sustainability of water-land-food resources nexus in the Volta River Basin, West Africa. Development of the archetypes centered on a generic causal loop diagram constructed with stakeholders in previous studies capturing the linkages between the population, water system, environmental and socioeconomics. These system archetypes illustrate that the past and the current paradigm of water and land and agricultural production management is unsustainable. The results highlight key areas, which could be useful for the current and future sustainable management, even under uncertain system understanding or deficiencies in quantitative data.

Towards Understanding and Sustaining Natural Resource Systems through the Systems Perspective: A Systematic Evaluation

“…Climate change, population growth, land degradation among other drivers are increasing the complexity of natural resources management [84]. The effects of these drivers are expected to grow continuously in the coming decades due to continuous anthropogenic activities [53]. This calls for an increase in the use of systems thinking tools to ensure the sustainability of natural resources [23].…”

“…Systems thinking is increasingly becoming popular as a method of understanding and managing complex problems, whether they rest within a local context, or are globally experienced [43,44,51]. Causal Loops Diagrams (CLDs), system archetypes, stock and flow diagrams, tree diagrams, fuzzy cognitive maps, and rich pictures are ST tools that have been used to understand and gain valuable insights into sustainable development problems [1,52,53].…”

“…System dynamics is one of the most popular systems thinking tools used for gaining a deeper understanding of complex system behaviors [21]. SD uses systemic feedback to simulate and gain insights into the complex behavior of the system ( [53,54]. SD equally examines the causal-relationships that exist between key drivers of change (such as biophysical, economic, social drivers) influencing the behavior of the system [55].…”

“…System dynamics through qualitative and quantitative models identify relevant feedback and causal loops that govern the behavior and structure of a complex system [53,58,59]. The application and development of SD models have increased in demand since they provide a set of conceptual and mathematical tools that enable the understanding of the structure and dynamics of complex systems [20,21].…”

“…SD is made up of two generic structures; the causal loop diagrams (CLDs) (qualitative modeling) and the stock and flow diagrams (quantitative modeling) [20]. These models have successfully been applied to various disciplines including natural resource management [61,62], energy consumption [59,63,64], agricultural development [55,65], food security [66,67] water resource management [17,23,[68][69][70], and the water, energy, and food nexus (WEF) [24,53,71]. SD models have been applied to several fields and disciplines beyond those listed in this study but for the context of this study, only the areas listed will be considered.…”