An example of a socio-environmental system in 3 minutes

A socio-environmental (S-E) system refers to a group of humans, social elements, and processes that interact with each other and nature. This clip provides an example of such a system. It is set in rural Indonesia and involves people living in a sustainable way in which their livelihoods are consistent with healthy forests. The system components and their interactions are shown in brown and the environmental components in green. The various actions that link the social and environmental components are in gray ovals. The clip illustrates how a change in policy can have cascading effects that change interactions among components and result in an overall change (“emergent behavior”) to the socio-environmental system’s state, such that people become plagued with poverty and the forest is in decline.