Twenty questions about design behavior for sustainability, report of the International Expert Panel on behavioral science for design

How behavioral scientists, engineers, and architects can work together to advance how we all understand and practice design—in order to enhance sustainability in the built environment, and beyond.https://www.nature.com/documents/design_behavior_for_sustainability.pdfPublished versio

Groundwater Modeling with Stakeholders: Finding the Complexity that Matters

Article impact statement: Agent‐based models can effectively engage stakeholders in the modeling process and improve decision making in groundwater hydrology

Artificial Intelligence in Disaster Risk Communication: A Systematic Literature Review

Effective communication of disaster risks is crucial to provoking appropriate responses from citizens and emergency operators. With recent advancement in Artificial Intelligence (AI), several researchers have begun exploring machine learning techniques in improving disaster risk communication. This paper adopts a systematic literature approach to report on the various research activities involving the application of AI in disaster risk communication. The study found that research activities focus on two broad areas: (1) prediction and monitoring for early warning, and (2) information extraction and classification for situational awareness. These broad areas are discussed, including background information to help establish future applications of AI in disaster risk communication. The paper concludes with recommendations of several ways in which AI applications can have a broader role in disaster risk communication

No Stakeholder Is an Island:Human Barriers and Enablers in Participatory Environmental Modelling

Sustainability science strives to hone our ability to tackle problems that involve interconnected economic, social, and environmental systems. Addressing the root causes of these problems requires a more nuanced understanding of how human behaviour can undermine stakeholder engagement efforts towards effective conflict management and resolution. Participatory modelling—the co-production of knowledge via facilitated modelling workshops—plays a critical role in this endeavour by enabling participants to co-formulate problems and use modelling practices that aid in the description, solution, and decision-making actions of the group. While the difficulties of modelling with stakeholders are widely acknowledged, there is still a need to more concretely identify and categorize the barriers and opportunities that human behaviour presents to this type of engagement process. This review fills an important gap in participatory modelling practice by presenting five broad categories of barriers, along with strategies that can assist in overcoming them. We conclude with a series of actions and future research directions that the participatory modelling community as a whole can take to create more meaningful and behaviourally-attuned engagements that help stakeholders take concrete steps towards sustainability in natural resource management

What Prevents the Adoption of Regenerative Agriculture and What Can We Do about It? Lessons and Narratives from a Participatory Modelling Exercise in Australia

Regenerative agriculture (RegenAg) can help landholders attune their agricultural practices to the natural design of the earth’s cycles and support systems. The adoption of RegenAg, however, hinges not only on a good understanding of biophysical processes but perhaps more importantly on deep-seated values and beliefs which can become an obstacle for triggering widespread transitions towards synergistic relationships with the land. We designed and facilitated a Participatory Modelling exercise with RegenAg stakeholders in Australia—the aim was to provide a blueprint of how challenges and opportunities could be collaboratively explored in alignment with landholders’ personal views and perspectives. Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) were used to unpack and formalise landholder perspectives into a semi-quantitative shared ‘mental model’ of the barriers and enablers for adoption of RegenAg practices and to subsequently identify actions that might close the gap between the two. Five dominant narratives which encode the key drivers and pain points in the system were identified and extracted from the FCM as a way to promote the internalisation of outcomes and lessons from the engagement. The Participatory Modelling exercise revealed some of the key drivers of RegenAg in Australia, highlighting the complex forces at work and the need for coordinated actions at the institutional, social, and individual levels, across long timescales (decades). Such actions are necessary for RegenAg to play a greater role in local and regional economies and to embed balancing relationships within systems currently reliant on conventional agriculture with few internal incentives to change. Our methods and findings are relevant not only for those seeking to promote the adoption of RegenAg in Australia but also for governments and agriculturalists seeking to take a behaviorally attuned stance to engage with landholders on issues of sustainable and resilient agriculture. More broadly, the participatory process reported here demonstrates the use of bespoke virtual elicitation methods that were designed to collaborate with stakeholders under COVID-19 lockdown restrictions

Disaster Risk Communication in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities: The Role of Technology

Migrants, ethnic minorities and people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities are often more vulnerable to natural disasters due to cultural barriers and limited proficiency in the dominant language, which sometimes undermine their ability to access, interpret and respond to warnings. Technology can assist in engendering culturally and linguistically appropriate communication with CALD communities if key challenges are identified. This study contributes by reviewing relevant literature with the aim of ascertaining the most pressing challenges requiring technological interventions. Three broad issues (i.e., trust, message tailoring, and message translation) are identified and discussed, and potential solutions for addressing these issues are recommended

Groundwater Regulation, Compliance and Enforcement: Insights on Regulators, Regulated Actors and Frameworks in New South Wales, Australia

Compliance and enforcement is a major issue for groundwater management. Yet it remains untheorised and underexamined. This chapter drills down into Australian compliance and enforcement efforts, which have been on a significant reform journey over the last two decades, oscillating between being an under resourced, low priority water reform task, to taking primacy within national and state water reform frameworks. The chapter begins by developing an analytical framework for studying groundwater compliance and enforcement. Using a case study of the state of New South Wales, the chapter examines the experiences of a government regulator and the compliance and enforcement experiences of water users. It concludes with a summary of challenges and policy implications for groundwater compliance and enforcement regimes

Agent-based modelling of groundwater systems

Groundwater plays a vital role in sustaining ecosystems, food and water security, and will aid human adaptation to climate change.Scenario-based modelling can make unrealistic long-term forecasts as the two-way feedbacks between social and hydrogeologicalsystems are not explicitly included. The goal of this thesis is to develop a modelling framework that enables interdisciplinary,transparent, and collaborative model-based assessments that capture the coevolution of coupled systems of people and groundwater.To achieve this goal, principles of agent-based modelling and complex systems were adapted to groundwater problems, as a novelapproach to combine socio-economic and groundwater flow modelling. FlowLogo, a new software based on a finite-difference solutionto the governing equation of groundwater flow implemented in NetLogo, a widely-used open-source ABM platform, is introduced. Itscapabilities are demonstrated using a hypothetical groundwater management problem and scenario analysis of a suite of policy leversand agent traits. Opportunities and limitations of using FlowLogo as a decision-support tool in a number of groundwater hotspots arediscussed. We further test and demonstrate the use of FlowLogo through the “Groundwater Commons Game” (GCG), an agent-basedmodel of irrigated agriculture rooted in principles of human cooperation and collective action, grounded on the largest dataset ofcultural values in existence—The World Values Survey 6. Using this model, we simulate the long-term efficacy of groundwaterconservation policies in three major aquifer systems currently facing unsustainable demands—the Punjab (India/Pakistan), the CentralValley (USA) and the Murray-Darling Basin (Australia). These simulations reveal 'tipping points' where collective attitudes towardsgroundwater conservation shift abruptly with changes in cultural values and enforcement provisions. A second study examines thetemporal dynamics of social norms and advances our understanding of the factors that may accelerate transitions to regulatorycompliance, such strategies used to enforce and promote compliance and the prevalence of role models. Finally, the foundations forparticipatory groundwater modelling are proposed, where scientists and stakeholders may interact with live computational experimentsto test policy interventions and evaluate solutions

Participatory and Integrated Modelling under Contentious Water Use in Semiarid Basins

Addressing modern water management challenges requires the integration of physical, environmental and socio-economic aspects, including diverse stakeholders’ values, interests and goals. Early stakeholder involvement increases the likelihood of acceptance and legitimacy of potential solutions to these challenges. Participatory modelling allows stakeholders to co-design solutions, thus facilitating knowledge co-construction/social learning. In this work, we combine integrated modelling and participatory modelling to develop and deploy a digital platform supporting decision-making for water management in a semiarid basin under contentious water use. The purpose of this tool is exploring “on-the-fly” alternative water management strategies and potential policy pathways with stakeholders. We first co-designed specific water management strategies/impact indicators and collected local knowledge about farmers’ behaviour regarding groundwater regulation. Second, we coupled a node–link water balance model, a groundwater model and an agent-based model in a digital platform (SimCopiapo) for scenario exploration. This was done with constant input from key stakeholders through a participatory process. Our results suggest that reductions of groundwater demand (40%) alone are not sufficient to capture stakeholders’ interests and steer the system towards sustainable water use, and thus a portfolio of management strategies including exchanges of water rights, improvements to hydraulic infrastructure and robust enforcement policies is required. The establishment of an efficient enforcement policy to monitor compliance on caps imposed on groundwater use and sanction those breaching this regulation is required to trigger the minimum momentum for policy acceptance. Finally, the participatory modelling process led to the definition of a diverse collection of strategies/impact indicators, which are reflections of the stakeholders’ interests. This indicates that not only the final product—i.e., SimCopiapo—is of value but also the process leading to its creation