Inductive Modelling of Vulnerable Sustainability Systems

Abstract

Within the context of globalisation, managing territorial resources means overcoming the following problems: difficulty in implementing integrated management processes at various organisation levels; conflicting uses; unadapted decision systems, assymetric information and uneven operative processes in each dimension of sustainable development. To illustrate and overpass those difficulties in a territorial level, we propose to introduce an analogical induction-model to describe both vulnerability situations and associated resilience procedures. The construction of this model is founded on a truly integrated approach, combining the economic, social-cultural, and ecological aspects of territorial vulnerability. Constituted by three passive components as potential energy, kinetic energy, and energy dissipation, this approach assumes that economics are a social extension of a environmental energy system. So we claim that social and ecological pillars could be defined as subsystems of a global open inductive sustainability system which considers feedbacks as evolution sources. An applicative illustration of this model will then be presented, through a case study describing 2012’s American severe drought event.