Understanding social-ecological systems using loop analysis

The sustainable management of social–ecological systems (SESs) requires that we understand the complex structure of relationships and feedbacks among ecosystem components and socioeconomic entities. Therefore, the construction and analysis of models integrating ecological and human actors is crucial for describing the functioning of SESs, and qualitative modeling represents an ideal tool since it allows studying dependencies among variables of diverse types. In particular, the qualitative technique of loop analysis yields predictions about how a system’s variables respond to stress factors. Different interaction types, scarce information about functional relationships among variables, and uncertainties in the values of the parameters are the rule rather than exceptions when studying SESs. Accordingly, loop analysis seems to be perfectly suitable to investigate them. Here, we introduce the key aspects of loop analysis, discuss its applications to SESs, and suggest it enables making the first steps toward the integration of the three dimensions of sustainability.