Assessing the Environmental Quality Resulting from Damages to Human-Nature Interactions Caused by Population Increase: A Systems Thinking Approach

Multiple interactions between population increase-as driving force- and pressure factors can cause damage to human-nature interactions. In this paper, we aim to identify, understand, and assess those interactions that exert effects on environment quality. The assessments of multiple interactions will allow selecting management actions to reduce negative effects, such as the loss of vegetation cover, on the environment. However, multiple interactions hinder the understanding of such complex systems. The relevance of this study is related to the support of the systems thinking approach to achieve two objectives: (1) to build a conceptual framework that facilitates the construction of a network aimed at representing the multiple interactions; (2) to build a closed system for the sake of developing a sustainable environmental management system. Thus, the performance of the implemented management actions is assessed through the feedback loop of the closed system. The proposed conceptual framework and the closed system were applied to the state of Morelos, Mexico. We highlight the following results: the systems thinking approach facilitated the construction of a conceptual framework to build understandable causal network; a set of environmental pathways were derived from the causal network and then combined to define and assess a global environmental state. Environmental pathways are composed of relationships between population increase and pressure variables that exert effects on the environment quality; the feedback loop facilitated the performance analysis of implemented management actions related to natural protected areas. The current results suggest further research to apply this study to diverse systems where multiple interactions between drivers and pressure factors damage human-nature interactions, thus exerting effects on the environmental state.