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# Systems Thinking for Sustainability: Illustrated by the Application to Soil Erosion and Food Security

## Details

**Authors** Jenkins B

**Year** 2021

**Publisher** Journal of Systems Thinking 1(1):1-13

**Kind of work** article

**Discipline** Environment & Sustainability

**Reading level** technical

**Kind of engagement** scholarly

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.54120/jost.v1i1.1251) 
10.54120/jost.v1i1.1251

## In authors' words

### Abstract

A sustainability framework based on nested adaptive socio-ecological systems is used to analyse historical examples of soil erosion and its implications for food production and security for a growing population. While there are examples of innovation in agriculture to address food availability, there are also cases of inadequate social responses leading to famine. The analysis highlights the value of considering these issues in a framework of linked biophysical and socio-economic systems. The socio-economic system generates management interventions to resolve biophysical limitations such as soil depletion on food production. The socio-economic system is also responsible when there are inadequate social responses. Currently, the biophysical system produces enough food to feed the world population. However, food distribution through the socio-economic system results in increasing numbers of undernourished people. Biophysical system modelling indicates that unless major changes are made to the current world system, overshoot because of resource depletion will lead to system collapse within the 21st century. To develop sustainability strategies, we need to analyse the socio-economic response to this biophysical vulnerability. A socio-ecological analysis also indicates that perspectives based on power relations that govern real-world decision making rather than sustainability interventions to address food security, need to be incorporated.

### What they set out to do (purpose)

A paper applying a sustainability framework of nested adaptive socio-ecological systems to historical soil erosion and its consequences for food production and security.

### What they found (results)

The biophysical system currently produces enough food, but distribution through the socio-economic system leaves growing numbers undernourished — and without major changes, resource-depletion overshoot points toward system collapse within the 21st century.

## Commentary

### In short

Uses a framework of nested socio-ecological systems to analyze historical cases of soil erosion and what they meant for food security.

### Response

Jenkins places his own sustainability framework inside the DSRP structure rather than citing it in passing. Two sections are titled for it, “Relationship to DSRP” and “Relationship to DSRP Structure”, and Figure 7 draws the nested adaptive system framework as a DSRP structure. The reading is structural: socio-economic against biophysical systems, and one spatial scale against another, are the distinctions; the adaptive cycle with its four phases is a molecular structure in DSRP terms; and the linked cycles that make a nested adaptive system are the compound structure the framework rests on.

The discussion then puts perspectives to work. It sets the Malthusian reading of population outstripping food supply against the Godwinian reading of ingenuity raising production, and shows that which one is held decides which intervention is adopted — short-term profit maximisation overriding sustainable land management in the tobacco country of the American South. Jenkins takes that as the generic value of DSRP thinking, which he places as the fourth wave of systems thinking against his own framework as an example of the third. Five Cabrera works are cited.

**Patterns it shows** S, R, P

## Refers to

- [Handbook of Systems Thinking](https://dsrpevidence.org/element/382)

**How to cite this** Jenkins B (2021). Systems Thinking for Sustainability: Illustrated by the Application to Soil Erosion and Food Security. Journal of Systems Thinking 1(1):1-13.