INFEWS: US-China-Quantifying complex adaptive FEW systems with a coupled agent-based modeling framework

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With growing populations and economic development, the challenges of water, energy, and food security, as well as their inter-relations, have risen to the forefront as global concerns. When the scale of the problem is reduced to a regional level like a large river basin, nuances across these challenges emerge. This is because the basin-scale food, energy, and water (FEW) systems are essentially a coupled natural-human complex system of systems and should be collectively denoted as FEW nexus. Within the nexus both natural processes (e.g., rainfall-runoff for water supply) and human behavior (e.g., energy and food commodity markets and policies) are interdependent at hierarchical spatiotemporal scales. There are significant knowledge and capability gaps associated with this FEW nexus, particularly in the context of data and modeling. This project addresses these gaps by developing a new mathematical modeling framework to decipher the complex, adaptive food-energy-water system of systems (FEWSoS). This modeling tool can ensure policy coherence and coordination among stakeholders to build synergies and generate co-benefits (e.g., improving security in water, energy and food sectors simultaneously) that enable us to address the future challenges across multiple sectors. The project will leverage Mountaintop Initiative at Lehigh University for educational outreach by allowing engagement of small groups of interdisciplinary projects. They will also engage undergraduate students in the ADVANCE program and the BALANCE program in the STEM disciplines. They will also engage an international student from Ethiopia as a part of this project. Finally, the project will have a kickoff and wrap-up meeting between the US and China investigators. The proposed modeling framework will be centering on an agent-based representation of the linkages among food, energy and water sub-systems and between human and physical systems across multiple temporal and spatial scales. The three main research objectives are: (1) Constructing a comprehensive knowledge platform with a set of quantitative metrics for sustainability, vulnerability, and resilience of a FEWSoS via inventory and evaluation of both public and local data and information from the food, energy and water sectors; (2) Developing a spatially and temporally distributed modeling framework that analyzes the food-energy-water interactions in a given FEWSoS from local to river-basin scales. The interactions among food, energy, and water will be quantified with the aid of a hydro-agro-economic model (food module), an energy production cost model (energy module) and a process-based hydrologic model (water module); (3) Testing the utility of the developed FEWSoS modeling framework over two international river basins in the U.S. and China: the Columbia River and the Mekong River to elucidate similarities and differences in these FEWSoS, hence generating new understanding that is transferable to other river basins. PIs diverse backgrounds and experiences in water resources management, hydrologic modeling, energy market modeling, and hydro-agro-economic modeling from both the U.S. and China teams provide an excellent opportunity for graduate students and postdocs to work together across disciplines. The kick-off meeting in the US and the wrap-up meeting in China will allow all PIs to engage stakeholders from the beginning till the end of the project and make sure the model development echoes real world needs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.