Upscaling Participatory Modelling for Multi-Local Community-Based Climate Change Adaptation: Methodological developments and new insights into the vulnerability of complex, socio-ecological systems

This work reports on methodological developments of and findings from a series of participatory modelling processes implemented and adapted during several years of participatory action research, in multiple locations in Mexico, facilitating community-based climate change adaptation. The participatory modelling process involves the co-construction and joint use of qualitative, paper-based, causal loop models of the complex, socio-ecological systems in which community livelihoods and wellbeing thrive or fail. The process permits in situ collaborative system identification; co-evaluation of drivers of and threats to that system; and the co-evaluation of measures to mitigate those threats. A community´s vulnerability to climate change tends to be multilocal, that is, its vulnerability can be exacerbated by actors and communities outside, and potentially distant from it. Thus, adaptation measures need to be multi-local too. A problem during the years has been how to upscale the participatory modelling process from households and communities to include networks of communities across larger spatial scales, e.g. at county scale-level, to identify the most effective multi-local adaptation measures. Methodological developments supporting such upscaling include a simple, expressive, livelihoods- and capitals-based syntax and grammar that has permitted both the co-construction of comparable and consistent models, and the rapid training of participatory modelling teams. Model linkage and meta-model development have also contributed, alongside the use of manual, qualitative simulation techniques to allow modellers and participants to directly and jointly use the co-constructed model without software know-how and in locations where reliable energy supplies are not available. This research has led to: a hypothesis explaining socio-ecological system mal-adaptation to threats at different scale-levels leading to county-wide damage to livelihoods, wellbeing and the natural environment; a better understanding of the critical impact that non-extreme climate change events have on vulnerable systems; and warnings of unexpected international policy problems at the community scale.