Juliette Rooney-Varga from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Environmental Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Climate Change Initiative (CCI) and Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy, together with her co-authors received the Jay Wright Forrester Award at the 2026 International System Dynamics Conference (ISDC2026).
The award recognises the paper “Community-based propagation to scale up educational innovations in sustainability”, published in Nature Sustainability. The paper examines why conventional approaches such as outreach and word-of-mouth often have little impact in spreading educational innovations that can support climate and sustainability action. Using a dynamic computational model, the authors find that community-based propagation can rapidly accelerate adoption by supporting a community of “ambassadors” who share innovations with potential adopters. Under the conditions studied, this approach can generate exponential growth in adoption and rapidly outpace outreach and word-of-mouth propagation.
Read the paper: Community-based propagation to scale up educational innovations in sustainability
She is currently working on a follow-up paper exploring applications of the community-based scaling approach beyond education. This work is highly relevant to the mission of the InTRES Platform to advance and promote integrative and transformative research on Earth and societies.