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Action Plan
The power of a systems diagram like Kendra’s is that it provides a road map to options for controlling system behavior. In particular, it makes it easy to spot cause-and-effect relationships (arrows) that can be strengthened or weakened to shift the behavior of the system in desired directions. In other words, it helps your students identify what needs to be done to “fix” their environmental problem.
With this in mind, have your students first identify at least 2 or 3 arrows that might provide an opportunity for active intervention. Then have them do a “reality check” on how easy it is to make changes in each of these arrows. Finally, have them identify a specific change (i.e., strengthing or weakening) in a particular arrow as the action plan for their project. They may wish to choose the arrow that will have the greatest impact (if they can figure out which that is), or the one that’s easiest to change. If they’re lucky, those will be the same arrow, but most often they will be different.
From a teaching standpoint, the goal at this stage is to focus the student report/project/proposal on a fertile sub-topic by identifying one key process that:
- Is directly involved in a feedback loop controlling change in the system, and
- Is a good candidate for influence/change through direct student action and/or some political process.
Kendra was really getting into this assignment and was not content to analyze the problem. She wanted to help solve it and do her part to save real coral reefs.
With help from her teacher, she recognized that she could improve coral reef health by weakening any of the links in the upper (negative) feedback loops, since these loops “trap” reefs in a chronically sick state. Alternatively (or in addition), she could strengthen arrows in the lower loop, since this loop tends to boost reef health.
She directed her attention first to the upper loops. The two arrows with the minus signs, she quickly realized, are pretty much determined by physics and coral physiology. If pollution, sediment, or anchors land on the reef, the extent of damage is going to be determined mostly by the coral’s resistance to these threats and by the rates of coral recovery, and there’s little or nothing Kendra can do to change any of that. Accordingly, she decided not to waste time or energy on trying to change those arrows.
On the other hand, anchor damage can be controlled by people even without reducing boat activity, as she learned from the boat captain in the Florida Keys. Deployment of moorings and regulations requiring boat captains to use them can effectively decouple dive boat activity from anchor damage. Likewise, more environmentally friendly methods of construction and more active recycling programs might reduce the amount of sediment and pollution making its way to the ocean. These arrows, then, provided a more promising avenue for change.
The relationships between tourist visits and coastal development and boat activity were, she recognized, driven by some powerful economic forces and were unlikely to be easily changed by her.
Looking next at the positive (lower) feedback loop, she recognized that effective public education programs could convert tourist visits into increased public awareness of reef health issues (as they had for her during her visit to the reef), and that letter writing campaigns or other such efforts could more effectively translate public awareness into public action to create new laws, policies, or practices favoring improved coral reef health. Both of these arrows seemed like things she could do something about.
Based on this more thorough analysis, she revised her diagram once more. She included more explicit links to show how increased public concern and action could reduce anchor damage, pollution, and sedimentation. She also added a star to highlight the arrow she finally decided to focus on for her project—using education to strengthen the link between tourist visits and increased public awareness of reef health issues:
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