COVID 19: Causal Loop Diagramming (CLD) of Social-Ecological Interactions for Teaching Sustainable Development

Abstract

Sustainable development requires integrated systems thinking about environmental, economic, and social drivers to achieve long term solutions. Systems Thinking and Modelling (STM) is now taught widely in disciplines such as management, business, biology, and sustainability education. Recent Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID) such as COVID-19 in ‘hotspot’ rural locations highlight systemic socio-economic and health interactions in social-ecological systems (SES). While popular susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) models of EID focus on transmission factors, such as contact rates, SES drivers focus on the broader economic, ecological, and social factors that can enable EID. While STM has been applied to disease propagation aspects of EID, no current models attempt to model the multi-scalar interactions between health systems, economics, and the environment in rural settings where virus hosts and humans come into contact. Systems Dynamics Modelling (SDM) tools, such as causal loop diagrams (CLD) and Archetype diagrams can visualise the complex and multi-scalar ‘panarchic’ interactions influencing outbreaks of EID. In this chapter, we show that such multi-scalar CLD models can articulate the economic, environmental, social and health interactions that perpetuate unsustainable development and contribute to potential EID. Such models help visualise the complex dynamics of sustainable development in resource-constrained rural settings in ways that textbook descriptions do not always capture.