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The earliest and often most significant impacts of climate change in the American West is on water resources. For communities reliant on irrigated agriculture, ensuring water security in the face of climate change can be critical to the preservation of local economies and understanding water management practices can support climate resilience. Research techniques such as behavioral games can be used to study how incentives and interventions influence community behaviors toward water conservation practices. This work explores the development and evaluation of a digital behavioral economic game using data from the San Luis Valley in order to improve understanding of how groundwater is consumed and conserved within agricultural communities in Colorado beyond traditional study techniques. In 2023, stakeholders were recruited to play and validate the game as a tool for understanding groundwater conservation practices and discuss the advantages of this study mechanism compared to standard methods such as surveys that do not account for dynamic and interactive decision-making. Results showed that financial incentives significantly influenced participants' crop choices and water use patterns, while demonstrating the impact of data transparency and revealing the development of collaborative behaviors. Qualitative assessments provided insights into real-world challenges, including state pressure to restore aquifer levels and threats to the local economy's reliance on irrigated agriculture. Discussions emphasized the need for improved water conservation education and more effective subsidy approaches for agricultural practices. The study tool will help policy makers explore and pilot new institutional innovations to prevent overexploitation of natural renewable resources and can be used to inform and empower communities to actively engage in collaborative problem-solving processes leading to improved community water conservation efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a process of role-playing simulation (RPS) as it was used during an educational exercise in community dialogue in the Karkonosze Mountains region of southwest Poland. Over the past decade Karkonosze National Park, a regional tourist magnet, has provided an excellent example of environmental conflict emerging from the tensions between nature protection and economic development. The project we describe herein, a course called "Dynamics of Sustainable Development," was designed to give students the direct experience of challenges in solving difficult social-ecological problems with many linked conflicts and tensions. We focused on RPS to emphasize factors crucial to compromise. Because teaching students about conflict solving was our main objective, the second indirect but expected experience was to stimulate discussions among real stakeholders. Although RPS itself was not performed in the presence of the real stakeholders, their participation was ensured by inviting them for a final public debate where they got a chance to express their opinions about what they heard from the students. RPS offered the course participants not only a closer look at the conflict in the Karkonosze related to sustainable development, but also an insight into the general psychological background and evolution of conflicts. (Contains 4 figures.)

The gaming techniques are used to develop local ecological products with low resource and profit to agriculture and farmers.

Disasters pose a growing threat to sustainable development. Disaster risk management efforts have largely failed to arrest the underlying drivers of increased global risk: uncontrolled urbanization and proliferation of assets in hazardous areas. Resilience provides an opportunity to confront the social-ecological foundations of risk and development; yet it has been vaguely conceptualized, without offering a concrete approach to operationalization. We propose a conceptualization of disaster resilience centred on well-being: ' The ability of a system, community or society to pursue its social, ecological and economic development objectives, while managing its disaster risk over time in a mutually reinforcing way.' We present a conceptual framework for understanding the interconnections between disasters and development, and outline how it is being operationalized in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing consciousness of the complexity and universality of interactions between social and ecological systems. Here we investigate a simple social-ecological model of land cultivation. It is shown that even very simple rules of land-use and an ecosystem's dynamics can generate a variety of possible stationary states. In particular, the possibility of the existence of "desirable" stationary states is examined. These desirable states are understood in the sense of sustainable development, that is, profitable for farmers and non-degrading for ecosystems. It turns out that the existence of such states can depend strongly on the parameters that are under a government's control, e.g. subsides, and others. Although real systems can reveal much more complex and counterintuitive behaviour, such a "toy model" can at least give some insight, help to realize the range of possible scenarios and improve our intuition about what might happen in real systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]