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

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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.