Navigating the Complexity Across the Peace-Sustainability-Climate Nexus

Promoting peace and sustainability in human development while accounting for the risks associated with the impact of climate change on society has become more imperative than ever when addressing humanity's challenges of the twenty-first century. There is ample evidence that peace, sustainability, and climate security and their counterparts (conflict, unsustainability, and climate vulnerability) are entangled with multiple complex interactions and cannot be dealt with in isolation (i.e., decoupled) and independently from the environment and the numerous systems with which they interact. Yet, the intersection of peace, sustainability, and climate security or their opposites is rarely articulated with a systemic mindset.

A multisolving nexus approach is appropriate to capture the complexity and uncertainty of how the three sectors of peace, sustainability, and climate security play a role in community development, the nature of their causal chains, and the feedback on how community development affects the three sectors This presentation explores the value proposition of using a system dynamics approach, methodology, and tools to comprehend and model the underlying dynamic of the peace-sustainability-climate security (PSC) nexus at the community scale. Peace, sustainability, and climate security are considered three interconnected states (or cultures) that emerge from the interactions of multiple shared systems in a community landscape (environment) subject to various constraints (political, social, cultural, economic, environmental) and adverse events. These states influence and depend on each other.

The proposed approach acknowledges the multisectoral, multi-disciplinary, and participatory nature of community development and the importance of understanding how community issues; behavior; and socio-economic, political, and cultural structural patterns are related and depend on the underlying mental models used by community stakeholders and decision-makers.