SIM4Action: An Interactive Platform for Social-Environmental Systems Mapping and Causal Analysis

Juan Castilla-Rho 

SIM4Action is an open-source, browser-based platform for participatory analysis of complex socio-environmental systems through interactive causal network graphs. Existing systems mapping tools require practitioners to combine separate software for map construction, network analysis, and causal simulation; none provides an integrated workflow accessible to non-technical stakeholders. SIM4Action addresses this gap through a three-stage adaptive management workflow—Understand, Intervene, Monitor—implemented as dedicated analytical laboratories offering feedback loop detection, community detection, token-based causal diffusion simulation (probabilistic and deterministic modes with forward and backward propagation), multiple centrality metrics for leverage point identification, and a genetic algorithm optimiser for intervention resource allocation. Python’s scientific stack runs
in-browser via Pyodide/WebAssembly, enabling zero-installation deployment. A domain-agnostic, configuration-driven architecture serves multiple system maps, each defined by a Google Sheets data source and a JSON configuration file; core analytical libraries are independently importable for scripted research pipelines. Co-designed with stakeholders over six years across seven
funded projects spanning Australia, Chile, Peru, Finland, and the Western Indian Ocean region, the platform currently hosts over ten deployed system maps spanning fisheries, water governance, lithium extraction, and social welfare domains. This growing, standardised collection of causal models lays the groundwork for a broader research programme: from domain-specific case studies through cross-system structural comparisons toward a Systems Atlas—a large-scale repository enabling comparative analysis of socio-environmental complexity across domains, geographies, and scales. A public version is hosted at https://sim4action.io