System Dynamics for Climate Action
The tools we need to stop being surprised by the systems we're trying to change.
ROCeteer · 2 min read
Why Good Intentions Keep Producing Bad Outcomes
Climate action is full of well-intentioned interventions that produce unexpected, sometimes counterproductive, results. Biofuel subsidies that accelerated deforestation. Recycling programmes that shipped waste to developing nations. Carbon offsets that incentivised forestry projects with poor permanence.
These aren't failures of commitment. They're failures of systems understanding. And they keep happening because most climate strategy is designed with linear logic in a non-linear world.
The World Jay Forrester Built
Jay Forrester, the MIT engineer and systems theorist, spent his career demonstrating that complex systems behave in ways that are deeply counterintuitive. Policies designed to improve situations often make them worse. The obvious place to intervene is rarely the effective one.
He built system dynamics, a discipline for modelling feedback loops, time delays, and non-linear relationships in complex systems, precisely to address this. Today, tools like En-ROADS allow policymakers and business leaders to simulate the second and third-order effects of climate interventions before committing to them.
Feedback Loops Are the Engine of Climate Change, and Its Solution
The climate system itself is a masterclass in feedback dynamics. Melting permafrost releases methane, which accelerates warming, which melts more permafrost. These reinforcing loops are why climate scientists speak of tipping points.
But feedback loops can work in the other direction. Rapidly falling renewable costs create investment, which drives further cost reduction. Climate disclosure requirements create pressure on supply chains, which drives decarbonisation upstream. System dynamics helps us identify and amplify these positive loops.
“The structure of a system determines its behaviour. Change the structure, change the outcome.”
Jay Forrester
From Strategy to Systems Simulation
What would it mean for organisations to adopt systems dynamics thinking in their climate strategies? It starts with humility: recognising that your intervention exists within a system that will respond to it in ways you haven't fully anticipated. It continues with modelling: building explicit maps of the feedback structures within which your strategy operates. And it culminates in adaptive management: designing interventions with built-in learning loops.
ROCeteer embeds this thinking into its Co-Lab design. Not every convening needs a full system dynamics model, but every convening should include honest mapping of the reinforcing and balancing loops that will shape whether an intervention succeeds or fails.
The Most Important Insight
Forrester's most important insight for climate action may be this: when you push on a complex system, and it doesn't respond as expected, the usual reaction is to push harder. But the system isn't broken. It's telling you something. The leverage point isn't where you thought it was.
Climate action at scale requires us to become genuinely curious about why systems resist our efforts, and deeply skilled at finding the places where a small, well-placed intervention can shift everything.