INFEWS/T1: Decision-Driven Advances in Integrated Assessment Modeling of the Food-Energy-Water Nexus

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Scientific understanding of the interdependencies between food, energy, and water systems (FEWS) is of growing importance, as global change creates new risks as well as potential benefits from the integrated FEWS nexus. Many important decisions that influence FEWS nexus issues are made by regional decision makers. However, regional FEWS planning is also shaped by national and global dynamics, including socioeconomic and technological changes, international trade dynamics, climate change, and national efforts to address societal priorities such as economic growth and sustainable development goals (SDGs). The ability of nations to achieve these broader societal goals is, in turn, strongly influenced by regional decisions. This project develops a new, integrated analytical approach that considers the interconnections among food, energy, and water systems to improve regional FEWS planning. The research ensures consistency of regional planning scenarios with national and global trends, while also considering institutional barriers to integrated planning. This project focuses on integrated FEWS planning in river basins in Argentina and Uruguay. These locations are ideal testbeds for developing this new approach due to their strong regional-to-global connectivity through agricultural trade, diversity in institutional structures, and mix of far-reaching policies, from SDGs to climate adaptation. This research will directly benefit U.S. national interests, as sustainable development in Latin America promotes stability in international markets for agricultural and energy goods. Three primary science questions guide the research: (1) What analytical methods can be applied at regional scale to not only couple among FEW systems but also to broader national and global dynamics in a manner that is computationally efficient, data efficient, and decision-relevant? (2) What institutional barriers limit the adoption of FEW systems planning at a regional scale and how can analytical tools be designed and integrated into institutional processes to overcome those barriers? (3) How can uncertainties affecting regional the FEW systems decision-making processes be most effectively characterized and visualized to improve the robustness of FEW systems planning? Generalizable insights and analytical toolkits developed in answering these questions will promote more robust and sustainable economic growth internationally and in the United States, and will be transferable to other locations, including the United States. The overarching goal of this research is to design and use models to break down institutional barriers and facilitate joint institutional decision making across the food, energy, and water sectors. The project will contribute three science advances that facilitate adoption of the integrated regional planning approaches required to coordinate development activities across scales and sectors. (1) The project will contribute a modeling platform that can effectively couple sub-regional FEW systems together at the regional level and connect them to national and global socioeconomic and climatic forces in an internally consistent, computationally efficient, and decision-relevant manner to allow for comprehensive scenario exploration and uncertainty analysis. (2) The project will identify the institutional barriers to infusing nexus thinking in regional FEW systems planning by applying innovative institutional mapping and stakeholder engagement techniques to co-develop decision-relevant modeling advances. (3) The project will enhance the decision relevance of regional FEW systems modeling and planning scenarios by characterizing key uncertainties and aiding stakeholders in identifying and visualizing planning strategies that are robust to a wide array of future uncertainties. The institutional mapping in (2) will inform the nexus model construction in (1), and the efficient nexus model from (1) will be used to identify key dynamics and challenges to robustness in (3), which will be communicated via efficient visual analytics to in-country stakeholders in (2). Uruguay and Argentina will serve as learning laboratories to empirically explore these three advances because, despite their shared FEW systems challenges, the two countries differ with respect to key institutional, economic, climatic, and policy factors. These differences will allow alternative hypotheses to be tested regarding how best to design and use models to break down institutional barriers and facilitate joint institutional decision making in real-world contexts, as well as to demonstrate the transferability and generalizability of methodological advances.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.