Health environment and Sustainability in the EU Cases
Case 1, The Era of the Great Acceleration, and the Anthropocene.
Systems
A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that
achieves something. A system must consist of three kinds of things: elements,
interconnections, and a function or purpose. Purposes are deduced from behaviour, not
from rhetoric or stated goals.
Systems can be embedded in systems, which are embedded in yet other systems.
A stock is the foundation of any system. Stocks are the elements of the system that you can
see, feel, count, or measure at any given time. Stocks change over time through the actions
of a flow. Flows are filling and draining, births and deaths, purchases and sales, growth and
decay, deposits and withdrawals, successes, and failures.
A feedback loop is a closed chain of causal connections from a stock, through a set of
decisions or rules or physical laws or actions that are dependent on the level of the stock,
and back again through a flow to change the stock.
Balancing feedback loops are equilibrating or goal-seeking structures in systems and are
both sources of stability and sources of resistance to change.
Reinforcing feedback loops are self-enhancing, leading to exponential growth or to runaway
collapses over time.
Is there anything that is not a system?
Yes, a conglomeration without any interconnections or functions.
When a living creature dies, it loses its “system-ness.”
A system is a set of things: people, cells, molecules, or whatever. These things are
interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behaviour over time.
The system, to a large extent, causes its own behaviour!
The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the
system’s response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom
simple in the real world.
Examples.
Political leaders don’t cause recessions or economic booms. Ups and downs are
inherent in the structure of the market economy.
The flu virus does not attack you; you set up the conditions for it to flourish within
you.
Systems can change, adapt, respond to events, seek goals, mend injuries, and attend to their
own survival in lifelike ways, although they may contain or consist of non-living things.
Systems can be self-organizing, and often are self-repairing over at least some range of
disruptions. They are resilient, and many of them are evolutionary.
Out of one system other completely new, never-before-imagined systems can arise.
,‘Systems thinking’
As our world continues to change rapidly and become more complex, systems thinking will
help us manage, adapt, and see the wide range of choices we have before us.
It is a way of thinking that looks at the system as a whole and gives us the freedom to
identify the root causes of problems and see new opportunities.
The systems-thinking lens allows us to reclaim our intuition about whole systems and:
- hone our abilities to understand parts
- see interconnections
- ask “what-if” questions about possible future behaviours
- be creative and courageous about system redesign.
Complex adaptive systems
Fundamental property of being highly unpredictable.
1. Complex many working parts all of which are connected in some way
2. Adaptive constantly changing
3. Systems broad, operating over a range of scales.
Example. Hospital or healthcare
We are complex adaptive systems, our own bodies are magnificent examples of integrated,
interconnected, self-maintaining complexity.
Every person we encounter, every organization, every animal, garden, tree, and forest is a
complex system.
We need to understand complex adaptive systems to prevent catastrophes.
Self-organization:
System grows, gets bigger and complex, parts are getting more specialized and tightly
integrated together, each part doing what it needs to do to sustain itself creating conditions
that sustain the whole systems grow stable, resilient, and efficient.
“Because of feedback delays within complex systems, by the time a problem becomes
apparent it may be unnecessarily difficult to solve.” - A stitch in time saves nine.
More connectivity within than between parts of the system.
There needs to be a balance between diversity (e.g. work friends and football friends).
Dynamic Equilibrium: Optimal balance between Diversity & Connectivity (and
maintaining this equilibrium).
- System can deal with pressures and information flows smoothly between
elements of the system
- Diverse elements mean there can be a diversity of responses to pressures on the
system
,The “Great Acceleration” (Exponential growth)
The Great Acceleration is the dramatic, continuous, and roughly simultaneous surge in
growth rate across a large range of measures of human activity.
It is the strong growth of population, economy, use of natural resources, transport,
communication, knowledge, science, and technology after World War II.
It was first recorded in the mid-20th century and is continuing to this day.
The Great Acceleration refers to the most recent period of the proposed Anthropocene
epoch during which the rate of impact of human activity upon the Earth's geology and
ecosystems is increasing significantly.
Exponential growth is a pattern of data that shows greater increases with passing time
(never ending fast growth).
The great acceleration began a long time ago but has been increasing exponentially (faster
and faster).
The “Anthropocene”
Most recent period during which human activities have impacted the environment enough
to constitute a distinct geological change.
Anthropocene is defined by the changes that humans have brought. For example, the loss of
sweet water.
It’s a new geological era, which is happening right now.
The Anthropocene possibly began with industrial revolution and fossil fuels. Other’s think it
began much earlier when farming began.
Signs of the Anthropocene: Agriculture, urbanisation, deforestation, and pollution have
caused extraordinary changes on Earth.
Great acceleration is the process that led to the Anthropocene.
Complexity regarding sustainability and health
System: health and sustainability functional, accessible, and beneficial for everyone
System thinking helps to understand the big picture through identifying the multi-faceted
consequences of decision making.
Knowledge can avoid uncertainty and make ideas stronger, and change can occur in favour
of sustainability. To understand complexity, you must understand the relationships.
Example of system thinking (feedback loop):
Air pollution leads to bad health. How do we improve the health?
We need to get rid of bad gasses. What causes these gases?
Big driver of air pollution is cars
Electric cars will decrease air pollution, which improves health.
,Some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real
messes, have refused to go away.
Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic
disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist despite the analytical ability and
technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately
creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist, nonetheless.
To solve these problems, system thinking is needed look at interrelationships,
perspectives, and boundaries.
Resilience thinking approach:
Investigates how interaction between people and nature can best be managed.
7 PRINCIPLES:
o Diversity and Redundancy
Systems with many different components are generally more resilient than systems
with systems with few components; diversity allows some components to
compensate for the loss or failure of others
o Manage Connectivity
Well-connected systems can recover from disturbances more quickly, but overly
connected systems may lead to a rapid spread of disturbances
o Manage Slow variables and feedbacks
Often crucial to make sure ecosystems produce essential services if a slow variable
increases too much; feedbacks can either reinforce or dampen change
o Foster complex adaptive systems thinking
Accepting within a social ecological system several connections are occurring at the
same time on different levels, accepting unpredictability and uncertainty,
acknowledging a multitude of perspectives
o Encouraged learning
Always in development constant need to revise existing knowledge
o Broaden participation
Informed well-functioning group, build trust in shared understanding in both
fundamental ingredients for collective action
o Promote polycentric governance
Multiple governing bodies interact, supports collective interaction in times of change;
vulnerable to tensions between actors and institutions involving a wide range of
stakeholders means striking a balance between openness and mandates for decision
making
,Societal resilience
Social resilience is the ability of human communities to withstand and recover from stresses,
such as environmental change or social, economic, or political upheaval.
Resilience in societies and their life-supporting ecosystems is crucial in maintaining options
for future human development.
Ability to improvise, manage, adapt, and overcome.
When something unexpected happens, that might have a negative effect on society.
Resilience shows that society can bounce back to its original state.
Society must accept that there might be/is a negative impact. It is best to accept the
negative impact and because of that society will be able to bounce back.
The Covid situation…
We only realize something is not working when things get extremely bad.
Some changes might also be for the better (regarding covid: zoom-meetings, checking emails
from home, no more traffic jams).
Leverage points:
Points of power.
To achieve fundamental change, it is important to firstly identify the “right” interventions
(leverage points) and implement additional measures to reduce negative consequences.
Governments need to consider “deep” leverage points rather than focusing on “shallow”
leverage points.
Deep leverage point: can be realistically maintained over the long-term and cause a
fundamental change
Shallow leverage point: relatively easy to implement but does not result in significant
systemic change
Examples.
o Travel restrictions
- Shallow: start of the pandemic, the idea of not letting people with Covid in.
- Deep: hard situations/lockdowns, no one is allowed to enter (Stopping people
from traveling completely).
o Governments paying businesses for the economic loss.
- Shallow: if it’s for a short period of time
- Deep: if it’s for a long period of time
, Case 2, Environments and their effects on health
Types of environments and human health
Social, physical, infrastructure, and global environments.
Social environment = interactions in your daily life
Physical environment = staying healthy
- Socio-economic inequalities
- Suburbs vs. urban areas
- Disposal of waste, clean water supplies, elimination of stress
Example.
Obesity and the food environment:
Obesity leads to serious diseases, affect mental health and quality of life
1 in 4 classed as obese
No one is immune to obesity, but some people are more likely to become
obese
Important impact on likelihood of becoming obese…
o Income
o Social deprivation
o Ethnicity
Obesity prevalence of the most deprived 10% of the population is
approximately twice that of the least deprived 10%
Factors: behavior, environment, genetics, and culture
Difficult to eat healthy we live in an obesogenic environment, encouraging
weight gain and obesity
Key factor: out-of-home meals (takeaway)
Defining environments and making sense of them from a system thinking perspective
Personal environment
The environment you have a control over influence over well-being (hygiene, exercise,
drinking, smoking)
Ambient environment
The environment that doesn’t have an influence on other people where you work
Inner environment = inside your body
Outer environment = outside your body
Separating them are skin (protects from contaminants), gastrointestinal tract
(protects inner body from contaminants digested), and membrane in lungs (protect
from contaminants inhaled)
