Environmental systems and sustainable obesity prevention

Community based interventions have been described as one of the most promising approaches to the prevention of obesity. Lessons from successful prevention efforts have shown that increasing the capacity of communities to understand and address the complexity of causes is valuable in preventing obesity. These approaches have evolved overseveral generations of intervention design from an education approach to a community capacity approach and now to the application of systems thinking beyond a single project or program focus. In this session we describe the generations of community based intervention for obesity prevention and locate current systems efforts in these previous generations. One approach this session will elaborate on is group model building and the use of causal loop diagrams as a basis for intervention planning. We will draw from practical examples in Australia, describing efforts to build capacity for communities to use systems thinking to understand and address complexity in the design, implementation and evaluation of efforts to prevent obesity.