Causal Loop Diagrams Mar Menor and Campo de Cartagena

In the framework of the COASTAL project, at the Soil and Water Conservation Research group of the Spanish Research Council (CEBAS-CSIC), we organised six stakeholder workshops with representatives from agriculture, tourism, fisheries and salt pans, local population, public administrations, research and environmental NGOs and consultancies. During each of these workshops stakeholders jointly developed mental maps of the functioning of the socio-ecosystem of the Mar Menor coastal lagoon and its surrounding Campo de Cartagena. The methodology applied in the workshop fostered ‘Systems Thinking’ and helped to develop Causal Loop Diagrams (CLD). After the workshops, the six sectoral CLD were merged into one CLD describing all interactions mentioned by the stakeholders. This CLD was then presented and discussed with representatives of all sectors in a multi-actor workshop. Stakeholders also identified direction and weights of interactions that helped convert the CLD into Fuzzy Cognitive Maps. The weights were divided in high (1), medium (0.67) and low impact (0.33) of one variable on another. Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping was used to illustrate the impacts of different scenarios of implementation of individual or multiple solutions. This last step was performed in R script using FCMapper.