Week

Reference

Week 1

Jan 18

Lecture 1 - Introduction: (video) The definition of a system; Socio-ecological systems; What is systems analysis? What is sustainability? An overview of the course.

Lecture 2 - Complex Systems & Feedback: (video) Unintended consequences in complex systems; Analysis and synthesis; Feedback; Revisiting complex systems, Jevon's Paradox

Week 2

Jan 25

Lecture 3 - Natural Resource Systems: (video) Cowboy vs spaceship economy; Limits to growth; Themes of resource governance; The tragedy of the commons;

Lecture 4 - Technology and the Environment: (video) A typology of natural resources; Cooperative solutions to the Commons dilemma; Technical intervention & the environment; Introduction to Cybernetics; Human in the loop control; CPS and CPSS; The cybernetic picture of natural resource governance.

Week 3

Feb 1

Lecture 5 - Constructing Causal Loop Diagrams: (video) Causal diagram notation; link polarity; Good practices in CLD construction

Lecture 6 - Analyzing Causal Loop Diagrams: (video) Policy resistance and compensating feedback; Workload management; Polisy resistance in a model of traffic congestion 

Week 4

Feb 8

Lecture 7 - Stocks and Flows: (video) Identifying stocks and flows; Incorporating stocks and flows in CLDs; Auxiliary variables; A socio-hydrological model of irrigation

Lecture 8 - Contructing Models of Complex Phenomena: (video) A stock and flow model of global climate change; Vensim, a system dynamics software; Constructing a population growth model in Vensim

Week 5

Feb 15

Lecture 9 - Population dynamics: (video) Density independent population dynamics; Visualizing and understanding the solution space; Isoclines and integral curves; Density dependent population dynamics; Introduction to logistic growth

Lecture 10 - Biological growth models: (video) Proportionate logistic growth and harvesting functions; Sustainable harvesting; Inter-species interactions; 2 species Lotka Volterra dynamics; Fixed points and stability in the phase space; Extensions of predator prey dynamics  

Week 6

Feb 22

Lecture 11 - Open access fisheries: (video) Economic sub-model of open access harvesting; Stock-harvest and yield-effort relationships; Bio-economic equilibrium in an open access fishery; comparative statics 

Lecture 12 - Bifurcation and the static private-property fishery: (video) Introduction to bifurcations; bifurcation in a model of competing species; introduction to the static private propoerty fishery; Bio-economic equilibrium and comparison with open-access behavior

Week 7

Mar 1

Lecture 13 - Present value maximisation: (video) The present-value optimization problem; the rationale of discounting; Complexities in optimization problems; Necessary conditions and the Hamiltonian system for PV maximizing fishery; Bio-economic equilibrium and comparison with open-access and static-private property behavior

Lecture 14 - Sustainability in Dynamical Systems: (video) The different dimensions of sustainability; Stability and sustainability; Oscillations and boom-bust cycles; Invariance conditions; Optimal growth problems

Week 8

Mar 8

Lecture 15 - Course Mid-review: (video)

Midterm Examination

Week 9

Mar 15

Lecture 16 - Introduction to Game Theory: (video) Strategic interactions in real-worl scenarios; Ingredients of a game; Reasoning about behavior in a game; Dominant strategies and Pareto efficiency; The prisoners dilemma; Rationality vs optimality; 

Lecture 17 - Reasoning in Games: (video) Games with no dominant strategy; Best response strategies; Nash equilibrium; The pollution abatement game; Non-cooperative solutions and free riding; Side payments and effect on game structure 

Easley Ch 6.1-6.6

Perman Ch 9.1

Week 10

Mar 22

Lecture 18 - Environmental Games: (video) Free-riding, side payments and binding agreements; The pollution abatement game as an instance of prisonser's dilemma, chicken game and assurance game; Games with multiple players; Pollution abatement with 10 countries; Analyzing different payoff structures

Lecture 19 - Games with continuous stategies: (video) The continuous pollution abatement game; Payoff and best response functions; Finding the Nash equilibrium; Non-cooperative and cooperative solutions to the continuous abatement game; the efficiency gain of cooperation

Week 11

Mar 29

Lecture 20 - Game theory and resource consumption: (video) The groundwater game; cooperation and penalties; Anti-coordination games in water resource conflicts; Evolution of the game structure; A game theoretic model of resource consumption; 

Lecture 21 - Introduction to networks: (video) Why do networks matter in environmental problems; Related applications of network science; Fundamentals of Graphs; The small-world phenomenon

Madani 2010

Manzoor 2016

Easley Ch 2

Week 12

April 5

Lecture 22 - Centrality in networks: (video) Node degree and degree distributions; Distributions in random networks; Long tails and scale-free networks; Identifying central nodes in a network; Degree centrality; Eigenvector centrality; Betweenness centrality

Lecture 23 - Sustainability in ecological networks: (video) Introduction to foodwebs; formalisms of sustainability in ecology; Entropy as a measure of indeterminacy; Capacity, acsendency and reserve; Network robustness and sustainability; 

Week 13

April 12

Project presentations and term paper submission 

Lecture 24 - Decision making though dynamic programming models: (video) Linear oprimization problems; A two-crop example; Constraint formulation; Identifying the feasible set; Graphical solution to the minimum cost problem in 2 dimensional space; Formulation and tools for higher dimensional problems

Week 14

April 19

Lecture 25 - WEF Nexus: Multiple model integration: (video) The water-energy-food nexus; The MESSAGE energy supply model framework; Modularized approach to linking sectoral models; The NExus Solutions Tool (NEST); Scenario development; Typical model outputs and interpretation of results;    

Lecture 26 - Final course review: (video)

Week 15

April 26

Week 16

May 3