Developing Scenarios for Uncertain Complex Risks: Using SD to Explore Futures of Lyme Disease in the Netherlands

Lyme disease due to infection with Lyme borreliosis poses an uncertain dynamic threat to the Dutch and their public health system. This risk was used to develop and illustrate two variants of a National Risk Assessment approaches for slumbering/latent risks. This paper explains and illustrates the System Dynamics-based variant using the societal risk posed by Lyme disease. Thousands of plausible evolutions of lyme disease are generated using a System Dynamics model in order to assess the societal risk posed by Lyme disease. The risk is scored in the Dutch National Risk Assessment framework adapted to deeply uncertain dynamically complex risks, and mapped in a new type of risk diagram developed for uncertain complex risks in order to compare the risk posed by Lyme disease to other plausible risks. Finally, scenario discovery techniques are used to identify a small set of representative scenarios that could be used in a capability analysis.