One of the first pieces of work for the project Tackling health inequalities through green/blue infrastructure  is to build our understanding of the complex system underlying links between green/blue infrastructure and health inequalities. In this post, project research fellow Dr Mark Ferguson reflects on his experience of the process so far.

Mark writes…

I first came across ‘systems thinking’ and ‘systems maps’ when I was a graduate researcher in 2018. The sheer volume of lines going on in wildly different directions made me discount them as nothing more than an eccentric scientist’s misguided creation.

However, now as a research fellow, I have returned to them. When I was doing some systems thinking training, an image like the one below was shown:

It shows how even though generally there are collective goals such as reducing health inequalities through improving green / blue infrastructure (the white arrow), interventions which try to address this, such as through increasing green space in more deprived communities (a black arrow), can have the opposite effect. For example, this intervention may increase the desirability of the place, thereby increasing properties values, and making the newly greened area unaffordable to those that the intervention was initially trying to target.

Contemporary public health and environmental challenges are often plagued with issues such as this, an intervention operates within a ‘system’ and trying to impact this positively does not necessarily have simple linear effects and outcomes. This can be difficult for those of us who are used to modelling the association between one variable and another. Although systems maps can be challenging – what do we do once we have mapped a complex system? Where do they start and finish? Understanding, acknowledging and accepting the complexity of modern, real-world challenges is an important step in working out how they can be tackled.

So, I now appreciate systems thinking in public health and related disciplines; although, of course, it is possible that I have simply been assimilated deeper into the eccentric scientist’s groupthink.