The design of adaptation strategies that promote urban health and well-being in the face of climate change requires an understanding of the feedback interactions that take place between the dynamical state of a city, the health of its people, and the state of the planet. Complexity, contingency and uncertainty combine to impede the growth of such systemic understandings. In this paper we suggest that the collaborative development of conceptual models can help a group to identify potential leverage points for effective adaptation. We describe a three-step procedure that leads from the development of a high-level system template, through the selection of a problem space that contains one or more of the group’s adaptive challenges, to a specific conceptual model of a sub-system of importance to the group. This procedure is illustrated by a case study of urban dwellers’ maladaptive dependence on private motor vehicles. We conclude that a system dynamics approach, revolving around the collaborative construction of a set of conceptual models, can help communities to improve their adaptive capacity, and so better meet the challenge of maintaining, and even improving, urban health in the face of climate change.

A move towards more compact and climate-resilient cities is being encouraged around the world. As part of these plans, there is a need to manage the potential conflict between increasing urban densities and the extent of tree canopy in cities. Reductions in tree canopy are a major contributor to the urban heat island (UHI) effect, which will act to reduce rather than increase climate resilience in many cities. A systems thinking approach called Collaborative Conceptual Modelling was used to study the interaction between urban infill, tree canopy, and human health in Perth, Australia. The results indicated that under current planning policies and development practices, the behaviour of the system is dominated by the drive towards higher housing densities. While this may result in the attainment of urban infill targets, it is likely to lead to a reduction in tree canopy, higher temperatures, and a decrease in a range of other benefits provided by trees. Recommended actions to overcome this behaviour were determined by the identification of leverage points in the system. These included a shift to a sustainable development paradigm that places greater value on the environmental and social benefits provided by trees and a greater emphasis on a climate-resilient future. Market and legislative mechanisms should be integrated into the city’s greening strategy and development plans to ensure the protection of existing trees and the inclusion of new trees on public and private land.

Age-Friendly Cities (AFC) is a framework for promoting healthy ageing through local actions. We use systems thinking to assess potential outcomes of actions to support older people’s mobility, undertaken within an AFC commitment in Greater Sydney. Interviews with 20 informants involved in providing space, infrastructure, or services that affect how older people get around were analysed using causal loop diagrams (CLDs). Four approaches to support older people’s mobility were identified and situated to the Multiple Governance Framework: land use, open and public space, supplementary transport, and community transport. Analysis revealed potential for unwanted consequences associated with each, which can be generalised into three generic potential outcomes for other jurisdictions to consider. A recommendation from this research is for policy actors to examine feedback interactions between actions so that they can foresee a wider range of outcomes and take defensive action against those unwanted. By situating CLDs within the Multiple Governance Framework, this research not only identifies what to look for, in terms of potential outcomes, but also where to look, in terms of the level of decision-making. This research offers a new way to assess the functioning of AFC governance networks by their collective outcomes and challenges the standards for the evaluation of AFC. This study uses systems thinking to assess policy actions for supporting older people’s transportation mobility in Greater Sydney. These policy actions pertain to land use, open and public space, supplementary transport, and community transport. Analysis revealed the potential for unwanted consequences, which result from different actions undermining one another, systemic constraints, and failure to account for small, but important, details.

Salinity is an environmental phenomenon that affects the world's arid and semi-arid regions, where it causes soil degradation and problems for agriculture. Salinity began to attract serious attention in the irrigated districts of the Murray Valley in south-eastern Australia in the 1960s. However, observations that the south-eastern Australian landscape was affected by naturally occurring salts predates this period of awareness by more than half a century. Drawing on documentary history, the present paper reveals what soil chemists in New South Wales in the 1890s already understood of the potential dangers of salinity. These scientists were aware of the experience of their colonial colleagues in British India, where the seriousness of the problem had been recognised by the 1870s. Using evidence from India and south-eastern Australia in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the paper outlines the opposing worldviews of scientists and engineers in New South Wales about the potential dangers of intensive irrigation. It offers an explanation as to why that understanding was insufficient to prevent the growth of the problem.