Session 2.6: Global Economics and Integrated Assessments
For a complete list of all of the workshop abstracts click here (PDF).
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Session 2.6: Oral Presentation
Title: From SSPs to global RAPs – a conceptual framework
Authors: H. Lotze-Campen1, D. van der Mensbrugghe2, H. van Meijl3, I. Perez-Dominguez4,
K. Wiebe5, A. Popp1, F. Humpenoeder1, B. Bodirsky1, A. Biewald1, S. Fujimori6, T.
Hasegawa6, E. Stehfest7, T. Kra7, A. Tabeau3, P. Havlík8, H. Valin8, K. Kavallari9, P. Kyle10,
T. Brunelle11, R. Sands12, M. Springmann13, and B. O’Neill 1 PIK, Germany, 2 Purdue University, USA, 3 WUR, 4 JRC-IPTS , 5 IFPRI, 6 NIES, 7 PBL, 8 IIASA, 9 FAO, 10 PNNL, 11 CIRED, 12 USDA, 13 Oxford University
Abstract: We present a conceptual framework for developing a set of global Representative Agricultural Pathways (RAPs), which can be used for foresight exercises to assess long-term trends in global agriculture, especially under conditions of climate change and/or ambitious greenhouse gas mitigation efforts. The RAPs should describe a limited number of future agricultural (agro-economic) trajectories, defining a set of key inputs and outputs for model-based analyses of global food demand, agricultural production, food prices, trade, and land use change. The work builds on previous efforts by Valdivia et al. (2015) and O’Neill et al. (2015). The RAPs will be based on the narratives and implementation of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) (O’Neill et al. 2015). The SSP narratives already contain quantitative information on GDP and population as well as important qualitative
descriptions on key characteristics relevant to future global agriculture: productivity growth, globalization and trade liberalization, environmental and land use change regulations, lifestyles and dietary preferences. The RAPs add to these, as far as necessary, more specific agricultural elements, e.g. changes in domestic and regional agricultural policies. The SSP/RAP elements will be used to harmonize model assumptions and key inputs among 10-15 global economic models participating in AgMIP and partly in the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISI-MIP). All quantitative elements of the RAPs may also be described in an agricultural narrative that would allow for quantification of other elements needed by other modeling groups, such as the global gridded crop models (GGCMs) or regional economic models.
Session 2.6: Oral Presentation
Title: Climate change stabilization and the global agricultural sector under alternative future development scenarios
Authors: Petr Havlik1, K. Calvin2, S. Fujimori3, A. Popp4, E. Stehfest5, H. Valin1, B. Bodirsky4, O. Fricko1, F Humpenöder4, H. Lotze-Campen4, and M. Obersteiner1 1 IIASA, Austria, 2 PNNL, USA, 3 NIES, Japan, 4 PIK, Germany, 5 PBL, The Netherlands
Abstract: Agriculture, forestry, and other land use(AFOLU) is, with 25%, the largest contributor to global anthropogenic GHG emissions. This alone would suffice to make the ambition of the Paris COP21 Agreement to stabilize global temperature rise below 2 degrees a formidable challenge for the sector. In addition, this target, will require large amount of negative emissions. But the two major sources of negative emissions – afforestation and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)- require large amounts of land and hence enter directly in competition with the traditional agricultural production. Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) together with the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) represent the backbone of the new IPCC scenario framework. The five SSPs have been designed to spread the space of plausible future developments. Agricultural sector is treated in detail, with particular attention to technological change, dietary preferences, losses and wastes along the supply chain, and international trade. Five integrated assessment modeling teams, all of them participating in the Global Economic Group of AgMIP, transposed the SSPs narratives into quantitative model drivers and quantified the scenarios. Here, we provide the most important results in terms of agricultural markets developments as well as resource use. After a brief summary of the different agricultural sector futures in the reference scenarios, we focus on the expected contribution from the agricultural sector to climate change stabilization at around 2 degrees, and discuss what the major agricultural and land use mitigation strategies in the different models are and what their relative contribution to the target is.
Session 2.6: Oral Presentation
Title: Dynamic economic model of arable crop rotation
Authors: Ian McFarlane University of Reading, UK
Abstract: Rapid progress is being made in CRISPR and other forms of gene editing technology. The techniques are helping to reduce the cost of development of arable crops with traits to alleviate biotic and abiotic stresses, and to provide nutritional and other downstream benefits. The investment required to develop and obtain approval for new traits to be released into the environment remains substantial. An economic model has been developed to provide a decision support tool for assessing the return on investment in crops with novel traits, as part of a work package with the FP7 project ‘Assessing and Monitoring the Impacts of Genetically modified plants on Agro-ecosystems’ (AMIGA) (www.amigaproject.eu). The progress of a novel crop compared with an equivalent conventional crop is modelled in monthly time steps, with management decisions about application of controls (pesticide or herbicide for example) applied at each monthly step. The simulation extends over up to seven crop cycles, enabling simulation of the effect of crop rotation on soil condition, including decisions regarding use of tillage. In this paper, we report simulation of arable farm gross margin over typical crop rotations before and after inclusion of crops with novel traits as one or more of the crops in the rotation. The results include simulation of variation in crop stresses that may arise as a consequence of climate change.
Session 2.6: Oral Presentation
Title: Intensification and production reallocation: Attributing land-use changes to their underlying drivers
Authors: Thierry Brunelle1, P. Dumas1, and W. B. Aoun2 1 CIRAD, UMR CIRED, France, 2 INRA, UMR ECOSYS, France
Abstract: Debates on bioenergy production emphasized the complex nature of land-use changes which put into play responses from the demand and supply-side based on price signals and biophysical potentials. Every change in agricultural production leads to mechanisms of intensification, production reallocation and changes in demand which usually refer to as indirect land-use changes (ILUC). These indirect effects have been estimated by many studies, however their mechanic has never been made completely explicit. Thus, to improve our understanding of land-use dynamic, the objective of this paper is to attribute as precisely as possible land-use changes to their underlying drivers. The following processes are considered: changes in yield due to (i) input use and to (ii) expansion on marginal lands, and changes of production allocation (iii) across countries and (iv) across sectors (between crop and livestock). This study provides first an analytic decomposition of land-use changes from a production shock that makes it possible to distinguish between land-use changes directly resulting from the production shock and those resulting from price-induced effects. A numerical analysis is then conducted using the global model of land-use NLU in the case of a biofuel scenario from rapeseed in France.
Session 2.6: Oral Presentation
Title: Alternative Futures for Global Food and Agriculture
Authors: Martin von Lampe OECD
Abstract: The OECD study Alternative Futures for Global Food and Agriculture provides insights into possible futures, challenges and opportunities facing the agricultural systems. Three alternative scenarios depict alternative pathways which the world may follow towards 2050. They were developed and analysed by officials of agricultural ministries in OECD and emerging economies. Where possible, the scenarios were quantified with the help of four global economic models. More qualitative scenario elements were analysed by various subject experts. This paper focuses on the interaction between ministry officials, economic models and subject experts, coordinated and facilitated by the OECD Secretariat. The involvement of agricultural Ministries throughout the project was pivotal for raising the relevance of the study outcomes for public policies, both in terms of substance and buy-in. Officials therefore were defining the fundamentals of the three scenarios as well as prioritising the focus areas of the analysis, before discussing outcomes and policy messages. At the same time, given the breadth of the analysis, the expertise of academics and industry analysts was important to provide the required basis for debates on specific challenges and policy options. Finally, with the quantification of both the scenarios and of several choice strategies, four of the AgMIP Global Economic Models provided numerical information on significant scenario elements. The combination of policy involvement, substance expertise and quantitative modelling generated strong
global recommendations. To make them more operational, the scenarios and conclusions are open for discussion at regional, national and sub-national levels to challenge and refine assumptions, outcomes and conclusions.
Session 2.6: Oral Presentation
Title: A simple recursive dynamic long-term agricultural sector model.
Authors: Marcel Adenauer OECD, Trade and Agriculture Directorate
Abstract: Economic agricultural sector models have been used widely to analyse not only medium term impacts of changes in the economic and political environment but also to address long term questions regarding resource constraints and climate change. Many of those models are quite detailed in terms of spatial representation of agricultural supply, commodity disaggregation or trade representation. A study which was taken out at the OECD where long term future scenarios were assessed with several of these models found that prices for agricultural commodities would increase considerably compared to the last decade in almost all scenarios that were analysed. At the same time OECDs medium term projections suggest that prices are not going to increase much in the coming 10 years. To attain a better understanding on how medium term projections of agricultural markets link into their long term prospects, a simplified model for agricultural commodity markets was developed in the spirit of Tom Hertel’s SIMPLE model. This partial equilibrium model which will be presented here operates on a highly aggregated regional and product scale with only a few parameters steering model response and it has the potential to enhance the toolbox of existing models being capable to quickly assess how basic drivers like population, economic and productivity growth are interlinked with future supply, demand and price levels of food commodities.
41. Poster Presentation: Session 2.6
Title: Towards a new generation of Decision Support Models: The TOA-MD Model version 6.1 and Tools for Impact Assessment
Authors: John Antle1 and R. Valdivia1 1 Oregon State University, USA
Abstract: The TOA-MD model is a parsimonious, generic model for analysis of technology adoption, climate impact assessment and ecosystem services analysis. The TOA-MD model simulates technology adoption and impact in a population of heterogeneous farms. There are several features of this model that are novel as compared to most other economic models being used for technology adoption and climate impact assessment. The TOA-MD represents the whole farm production system (i.e. includes crops, livestock and aquaculture sub-systems, and the farm household characteristics). The TOA-MD is a model of a farm population, not a model of an individual or “representative” farm. Accordingly, the fundamental parameters of the model are population statistics – means, variances and correlations of the economic variables in the models and the associated outcome variables of interest. With suitable bio-physical and economic data, these statistical parameters can be estimated for current systems. Using the methods such as the AgMIP Regional Integrated Assessment approach, we can estimate how the TOA-MD model parameters would change in response to climate change or technological adaptations. These changes in model parameters are the basis for the climate impact, vulnerability and adaptation analysis. The TOA-MD simulates impacts that are statistically associated with adoption, using the standard statistical framework for econometric policy evaluation in which economic “agents” – in our context, farms – self-select into “treatment”, i.e, choose to adopt or not adopt. The model can be used to estimate the so-called “treatment effects” or the impacts associated with technology adoption. The impacts of climate change estimated by the TOA-MD model are the “treatment effects” of climate change. In this presentation we also describe several tools developed to design Representative Agricultural Pathways (RAPs) and to estimate TOA-MD model parameters. These tools are used to facilitate the implementation
42. Poster Presentation: Session 2.6
Title: Crop Yields, Food Security, and GHG Emissions: An Analysis of Global Mitigation Options for Rice Cultivation
Authors: Robert Beach1 , J. Creason2 , Z. Hussein2 , S. Ragnauth2 , S.B. Ohrel2 , C
Li3 , and W. Salas4 1 RTI International, 2 EPA, 3 University of New Hampshire and Applied Geosolutions, 4 Applied Geosolutions
Abstract: Global agriculture faces the dual challenges of improving food security for a growing population while simultaneously reducing the environmental footprint of agricultural production, including net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Paddy rice production is the 5th largest source of methane emissions, globally. However, the impacts of crop production decisions extend beyond the overall economic costs and benefits. Fueled by concerns over ethanol, a lively debate has emerged over food security issues (Searchinger, et al 2013) and other distributional concerns. Rice is a staple crop produced in areas with fast-growing populations that have been plagued by food shortages. While mitigation of methane from rice cultivation may be relatively low-cost, it might have an adverse impact on food security. Extending prior work on GHG mitigation to examine food security implications, we used the GTAP model is to examine domestic consumption and trade flows between 140 countries in the v9 GTAP data set. Food security is assessed using food balance sheet data from the FAO. We find that at carbon prices up to $50 the result on food security is mixed. This analysis provides valuable insights into the potential tradeoffs and synergies between food security and GHG mitigation from rice cultivation in different parts of the world.
43. Poster Presentation: Session 2.6
Title: Implications of climate change for agricultural GHG mitigation in Latin America
Authors: Robert Beach1 and S. Waldhoff2 1 RTI International, 2 PNNL
Abstract: Climate change is expected to have impacts on agricultural productivity that will vary substantially both spatially and temporally. Among other effects, these productivity shocks are likely to alter the relative attractiveness of alternative strategies for greenhouse gas mitigation. These interactions make it very important to consider potential future climate when estimating mitigation potential. However, there have been relatively few studies that have explicitly examined interactions between productivity impacts induced by climate change and mitigation potential from the agricultural sector. In this study, we examine the implications of alternative climate scenarios for mitigation potential as well as for the mix of mitigation options that would be used. Although the primary focus is on Latin America, we reflect global scenarios in order to capture interactions between agricultural markets through international trade. We apply the Applied Dynamic Analysis of the Global Economy (ADAGE) computable general equilibrium model to examine scenarios both independently as well as in combination and calculate the marginal impacts of incorporating climate change impacts into mitigation analyses based on the differences between scenarios. We find important differences in the optimal mitigation portfolio and distribution of mitigation activities across global regions across climate scenarios. Our findings suggest that individual countries should take into consideration the overall costs and benefits associated with adaptation and mitigation policies as well as the interactions of domestic policy with international policies when designing programs and policies.
44. Poster Presentation: Session 2.6
Title: Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems (INFEWS): A National Science Foundation (USA) initiative to examine critical issues in today’s world
Authors: James W. Jones1 , J. Lighty2 , B. Schottel3 , and A. Zycherman4 1 INFEWS Program Director, 2 Division Director, 3 Science Analyst for INFEWS, 4 AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow, National Science Foundation, Directorate for Engineering, Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Chemical and Environmental Systems (CBET), USA
Abstract: At the end of 2015, the National Science Foundation (NSF) put out its first request for proposals for the INFEWS program (Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems). The program, funded at 35 Million Dollars for the 2016 fiscal year, and consecutively (expected) over the next five years, will fund interdisciplinary projects that fall into four tracks 1. System modeling, 2. Visualization and Decision Support, 3. Innovative System Solutions, and 4. Education and Workforce Development. The program expects to tackle Food-Energy-Water System (FEWS) research through integration across disciplines, in which agricultural and food systems research is a primary component. To this end NSF has partnered with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to fund related research. This program developed from the Science, Engineering and education for Sustainability (SEES) program, which in 2015 funded 17 FEWS workshops. These interdisciplinary workshops brought together researchers and other stakeholders from universities, local, state, and federal governments, industry, and non-profits to examine a wide range of FEW questions and identify the research, data and technological needs to solve them. This poster presents an overview of the development of the INFEWS program, some pressing FEW needs as identified by the broader research community, and national and international opportunities for future engagement with the program.
45. Poster Presentation: Session 2.6
Title: Sustainably intensifying global cropland by considering yield-environmental tradeoffs
Authors: Wenfeng Liu1 and H. Yang2 1 Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Switzerland, 2 Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology; Faculty of Sciences, University of Basel, Switzerland
Abstract: In the context of global population growth, diet shift to more calorie- and protein-consumption, and biofuel competition, agriculture is facing the triple challenges a) meeting the global increasing food demand, b) alleviating the environmental impacts, and c) minimizing the additional inputs. Due to constraints of cropland expansion and its highly environmental costs, sustainably intensifying the existing cropland is key to address these challenges. Here, the Python-based Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (PEPIC) model is used to investigate the tradeoffs between crop yield improvements and environmental costs by considering different intensification scenarios. This study focuses on three major cereal crops: maize, rice, and wheat. Results show that some regions have high potential to increase yields especially in Africa and South America by increasing nitrogen and irrigation inputs, while the potential is already exhausted in many other places. The marginal returns of nitrogen fertilizer and irrigation and environmental costs present different spatial patterns. High environmental costs are associated with low marginal returns of nitrogen fertilizer. By intensifying agriculture in regions with low environmental costs, global average yield improvement would be only slightly lower than the scenario of intensification over the whole cropland, but nitrogen losses and the additional demand for nitrogen and irrigation inputs under the former are much smaller than the latter. This study suggests the importance of considering yield-environmental tradeoffs in sustainable agricultural intensification and highlights the regions with high potentials of doing so.