This interdisciplinary project will leverage high-performance computing to assess key challenges of climate change vulnerabilities, impacts, and adaptations by applying an economic modeling and analysis framework using biophysical and statistical models. The overall goal is an improved understanding of the interactions of climate and socio-economic changes on: 1) the supply and demand of agricultural commodities, 2) local land-use and land-cover, and 3) regional and global food sustainability. A number of research efforts and technologies are anticipated, including a new framework for massively parallel simulations of impact models, a methodology and software suite for scaling the resulting measures to arbitrary spatial scales, a set of validation experiments, and a set of scenario based adaptation experiments to evaluate socio-technical and environmental pathways to sustainable food and climate futures. The project will use a new high-performance information technology system (Framework to Advance Climate, Economic, and Impact Investigations with Information Technology, or FACE-IT) that is designed to enable, record, share, and distribute data products and software between different communities. The project will also develop new tools for delivering information directly to decision-makers operating at various scales from international policy-makers to local watershed managers and agricultural development authorities.
The primary way in which humans interact with their physical environment is through the possession and management of land. Accommodating increasing demands for agricultural commodities, forest products, mining resources, and urban sprawl with limited nutrient reserves, water resources, soil depletion, and changing climates is a constant struggle. The primary drivers of changes in land use continue to be economic, social, and technological and the primary decision makers continue to be individual farmers, corporations, and developers operating in a highly complex socio-technical, political, and environmental landscape. In the coming decades, policymakers and stakeholders at every scale and level of government and industry will be required to make multi-billion dollar decisions around agricultural production and food supply. Models developed in this project will be applied to various regional, national, and global sustainability and climate vulnerabilities, impacts, and adaptations assessments. The information products and interactive web applications on the impacts of climate change, growing populations, and changing diets and demographics on global food sustainability will better enable science-based decisions related to these critical sustainability issues.
The project will also make information about food sustainability available to the general public, and will engage high school students and teachers in sustainability science activities.
This project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. With SEES Fellows support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish themselves in an independent research career related to sustainability.
