Web Technologies and System Dynamics for

Community Sustainability

Gordon Keating, Donatella Pasqualini, & Gary Geernaert

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Larry BarnettEpiphanet, Inc.

February 6, 2009 Applied Solutions Workshop, Rohnert Park, CA

Funding: SCWA and IGPP

The Challenge

• Develop a web portal that will – build community among sustainability-minded

communities in the U.S.– interest, inform, enlist, and retain input from

Sonoma regional citizens

• Map out a course towards energy sustainability and resilience, carbon neutrality, and economic vitality, given projections of future climate change

• Define solutions to serve as an example for the state of California, the U.S., and international organizations

In order to meet the goals of carbon footprint reduction outlined in AB32 and Sonoma County’s GHG reduction targets…

“Change in energy use and GHG emissions must begin with local efforts.”

• Develop an understanding of the interrelationships among important natural, built, and social systems, and ways to enhance their collective resilience,

• Engage public and build community through social networking features

• Collect and analyze public ideas to inform decision making

Approach

Stakeholders: Sonoma County public, Business community, Environmental community, Municipal and County governments, External counties and regions

Example: Drupal

• Information

• Interactivity

• News feeds

• Presence & Social networking

• Content awareness

• Surveys

• Interactive models

• Data animation

• Consensus building

……

Content Management System (CMS)

Gathering User Input – Survey

Mindmap (undirected graph)

Example from a study of potential new directions for a scientific organization:“What are core capabilities of the organization that have been important in your work?”

Gathering User Input - Blogs

Tag Cloud

(http:\\tagcrowd.com)

Tagclouds are useful for providing a gestalt of blogs, discussions, comments, tags

User comments, blogs, and survey responses can be analyzed and visualized in a variety of ways

User Input Analysis

Mindmap (undirected graph)

Statistics

Interactive Graphs

http://www.creativesynthesis.net/recycling/graphgeardemo/

Tag Cloud

http://www.scwa.ca.gov/water_conservation/

http://tagcrowd.com/

Goal: provide actionable understanding of changing attitudes and priorities of site users (citizens)

Expect complex interrelationshipsamong component systems

• Policy selection• Scenario comparison• Nonlinear feedbacks

System Dynamics ModelInvestigate non-intuitive interrelationships among important systems that affect energy-water sustainability and resilience

The model is designed to track the CO2 flow across sectors

Total CO2 emissions

CO2 emissions from

transportation

CO2 emissions from

electricity generation

In this first version of the model, we considered two CO2 emissions sources

Renewable Policy: wind

Renewable Policy: PV

Renewable Policy: wind

Public Transp Policy

Hybrid-cars Policy

Mental model

residential transportation

industry/commercial

transportationresidential electricity

industry/commercialelectricity

electricity for water treatment

water demand

Demand

population Economics

climate change

population

climate change

population

Exogenous drivers