FEW: Coupling Economic Models with Agronomic, Hydrologic, and Bioenergy Models for Sustainable Food, Energy, and Water Systems

随着气候模型的预测表明，一些拥有高产农业用地的地区将越来越多地面临干旱和洪水条件，维持可持续的粮食、能源以及水的质量和数量方面的新挑战显然即将出现。人口增长和土地利用的快速变化也威胁着生产性农业用地。需要采取旨在适应和减轻这些变化影响的政策，以减少这些影响。然而，很明显，食物、能源和水(少数几个)系统是相互依存的。将这些系统视为土地、水和能源与粮食生产的单向耦合，省略了关键的反馈回路和基本权衡。对这些系统之间的经济和政策联系进行建模，将是理解这几个系统之间相互作用的重要手段。不了解相关生物物理和经济系统之间的反馈可能会导致严重的不良和意想不到的后果。将经济模型和生物物理模型结合起来是一项亟需的进步，可以提供宝贵的工具来支持健全的政策设计。为了开始开发生物物理和经济学模型所需的集成，爱荷华州立大学将主办一次为期两天的会议，将领先的经济学家和统计学家与作物科学家、水文学家、气候科学家和其他生物物理建模人员聚集在一起，以确定与理解少数系统相关的关键科学、工程和数据挑战。会议的具体目标是：(1)确定构成少数系统的个体行为、生物和自然系统在建模能力和科学理解方面的关键差距；(2)确定构成少数系统的行为、生物和自然系统之间模型联系的主要挑战；(3)确定在估计这些单独和关联模型用于预测和预测政策决策结果时的准确性方面的主要统计和计量经济学挑战，(4)确定在系统的各个组成部分内发展所需的建模能力并在少数几个系统的建模组成部分之间建立联系所需的关键数据和网络基础设施挑战，以及(5)确定在调整和使用这些模型以纳入气候变化方面的关键挑战。

New challenges to maintaining sustainable food, energy, and water quality and quantity are clearly on the horizon as projections from climate models suggest that some regions with highly productive agricultural lands will increasingly face both drought and flood conditions. Population growth and rapid land use change also threaten productive agricultural land. Policies aimed at adapting to and mitigating the effects of these changes will be needed to reduce the impacts. However, it has become clear that food, energy, and water (FEW) systems are integrally interdependent. Treating these systems as a uni-directional coupling of land, water, and energy to food production omits critical feedback loops and fundamental tradeoffs. Modeling the economic and policy linkages across these systems will be an important means of understanding the interactions across the FEW system. Failure to understand the feedbacks between the relevant biophysical and economic systems can lead to significant undesirable and unintended consequences. Integrating economic and biophysical models is a much needed advancement and could provide valuable tools to support sound policy design. In order to begin to develop the needed integration of biophysical and economics models, Iowa State University will host a two day conference to bring leading economists and statisticians together with crop scientists, hydrologists, climate scientists, and other biophysical modelers to identify the key scientific, engineering and data challenges associated with understanding the FEW system. The specific goals of the conference are to: (1) identify the key gaps in modeling capabilities and scientific understanding within the individual behavioral, biological, and natural systems that comprise the FEW system, (2) identify key challenges in model linkages across the behavioral, biological, and natural systems that comprise the FEW system, (3) identify the major statistical and econometric challenges in estimating the accuracy of these individual and linked models when they are used for forecasting and for predicting the outcomes of policy decisions, (4) identify the key data and cyberinfrastructure challenges required to develop the needed modeling capabilities within individual components of the system and to achieve linkages across the modeling components of the FEW system, and (5) identify key challenges in adapting and using these models to incorporate climate change.