Sustainability Systems Farm

The Sustainability Systems Farm will be a suite of simple open-source, systems-thinking models with exercises, for integration into existing course curriculum, to extend students’ perception of sustainability concepts beyond the lens of their particular discipline. Students are increasingly exposed to specific concepts of sustainability and global environmental issues in their education (such as climate change, food security, and economic growth and disparity), however they often continue to view these through the lens of their individual coursework, rather than develop a more holistic understanding of the issues and how they are connected. The Sustainability Systems Farm models will demonstrate complex socio-environmental economic interactions and dynamic behavior while illustrating the subtleties of sustainability principles. The farm will include 10 online system dynamics exercises for undergraduate and graduate coursework on common system structures (such as economic capital growth constrained by environmental resource and population dynamics) that are encountered frequently in sustainability concepts.

Steven Conrad

Associate Professor, Department of Systems Engineering