Systems Thinking as a Tool to Promote Human Health and Sustainable Behaviour Change Katharine Zywert, PhD Candidate, School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability

How social-ecological trajectories affect human health The unintended consequences of traditional communication strategies Systems thinking as a leverage point for encouraging behaviours with mutually-reinforcing gains for human and planetary health Katharine Zywert, PhD Candidate, School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability

Human health is tied to social-ecological systems trajectories Transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene Environmental implications of the Great Acceleration (Steffen et al., 2015) Ecological changes as increasingly strong determinants of health Katharine Zywert, PhD Candidate, School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability

Mainstream communication strategies have unintended consequences Terror management theory – we cling to dominant meaning frameworks to cope with fear of death When messages about climate change make people fear death, it can paradoxically increase environmentally damaging consumption The Anthropocene is an emerging scientific term for our current geological age. It marks a profound break with the Holocene epoch, a phase of climate stability which humanity has enjoyed since the end of the last ice age. With the industrial revolution, humanity created the mechanisms of mass production and consumption, and consequently began to exert a stronger influence on the biosphere. Since 1950, there has been a tremendous speeding up of the impacts of human economic activity on the function of planetary systems (Steffen et al., 2015). These graphs from Steffen et al. show this “great acceleration” and demonstrate how growth in human population, GDP, and energy use are coupled with a rise in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, surface temperature, and ocean acidification. These and other effects of the growing human socio-economic sphere have produced the environmental signatures of the Anthropocene, including global warming, altered weather patterns, crashing biodiversity, and rising levels of pollution. Katharine Zywert, PhD Candidate, School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability

Systems thinking can promote sustainable behaviour change and improve health Generates mutually-reinforcing gains for human and planetary health Short-term: taps into dominant individualistic worldviews Long-term: contributes to more systemic worldviews that will enable us to tackle global social-ecological challenges Katharine Zywert, PhD Candidate, School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability