Adapting to societal challenges, such as climate change, increasing water scarcity and hydrological extremes, while advancing towards the Sustainable Development Goals, requires dynamic transition pathways across various integrated systems (water, transport, energy, food, ecosystems, etc.). Evaluating how such transition pathways play a role for water management and policy calls for modeling approaches that account for interactions and feedbacks between human decisions and natural systems represented by MultiSector Dynamics (MSD) models and approaches.
The role of individual and collective human agency is increasingly recognized as a prominent and arguably paramount determinant in shaping the behavior, trajectory, vulnerability and resilience of these systems. Yet, the representation of human decision making in MSD and other coupled human and natural systems models is often highly abstracted and simplistic. Additionally, MSD models tend to ignore or largely abstract institutional dynamics in resource systems, commonly adopting rules that implicitly presume centralized, non-adaptive management of resources and infrastructure limiting our ability to understand how heterogeneous actors and institutions respond and adapt to climatic, hydrological, and societal change, and how these responses feedback across systems.
This session seeks to address these limitations, providing a forum for interdisciplinary exchange around the representation of human actors and action, emerging modeling approaches, and new insights across a wide range of MSD challenges for water management and policy. We thereby aim to contribute to a broader community spanning MultiSector Dynamics, socio-hydrology, human–water systems, water resources systems analysis, focused on advancing our understanding of the role of human agency in coupled human and natural systems facing environmental risks and the need for societal transformations. We broadly invite submissions across disciplinary and methodological modeling approaches (e.g., agent-based, economic, optimization, system dynamics, data-driven, AI/ML/generative, etc.) and domains (water, energy, transport, food, land, ecosystems, etc.). We particularly invite contributions that advance methodological approaches for representing heterogenous adaptive human actors and institutions within coupled human–natural system models, and for linking these representations and their management and policy implications across sectors and scales.