From adaptive management to the Green New Deal, systems thinking informs how we imagine just and sustainable futures. Complex interactions in coupled natural-human systems are difficult to model due to emergent properties, thresholds, and feedbacks, leading to unintended consequences and limiting our ability to intervene effectively. However, advances in systems modeling have developed across many socio-ecological domains, including approaches to address systems-of-systems (e.g. water-energy-food), co-benefits (e.g. climate and air quality), cascading failures (wildfires and electricity outages), and human-environment feedbacks (e.g. economy-induced land-use changes and atmosphere interactions).

What can we learn from common advances and challenges across these domains? We invite papers discussing new methodological approaches to systems modeling or novel applications from a diversity of geographical and disciplinary contexts. We are particularly interested in stimulating discussion on the potential and limits for translating insights across domains and how such insights can mitigate risks of multiple cascading failures in social-ecological systems.