INFEWS: U.S.-China: Increasing the Resilience of Human-Nature Interactions in the Yellow River Basin through Coordinated Food-Energy-Water Nexus Management

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The resilience of human-nature systems at the nexus of food, energy, and water (FEW) is threatened by environmental change such as increasing climate extremes, growing population demands, and evolving land use. Actionable strategies for improving both U.S. and China's agricultural, economic, and environmental sustainability must be developed through better understanding of how their mutual interactions with climate affect the evolution of the coupled FEW systems. The research project integrates state-of-the-art knowledge and modeling capabilities in climate, hydrologic, agronomic, biogeochemical, engineering, and economic sciences. The investigation will build a framework to realistically couple, predict and apply interactive water, carbon, and nitrogen cycle processes with agricultural practices, resource management and government policies to address critical issues of vulnerability, resilience and sustainability in regional FEW systems. The U.S.-China comparison will determine the importance of human activities in enhancing or reducing FEW system resilience, and thereby to provide science-based decision support to navigate sustainable resources use for food and energy crops production. The project includes an international exchange program to support education of the next generation of scientists in a transdisciplinary research framework in which the cross-fertilization of ideas is central. Students will be engaged in all aspects of the project and collaborate with senior scientists in both U.S. and China teams, preparing these broadly trained researchers on new approaches critical for the future. The overarching goal of this project is to develop, evaluate, and apply a coupled modeling framework to address the adaptability of China's Food production-Energy development-Water supply systems (CFEW). The framework will incorporate environmental changes and human activities in the Yellow River Basin, where demands on these systems are in sharp conflict. The study will include the production of the main food and bioenergy crops; energy development from hydropower, coal reserves and biomass feedstocks; and the water supply management that includes reservoir operation, flood control, and irrigation strategy. The proposed approach explicitly incorporates interdependency, human-centric, and extremality hypotheses to enable deeper understanding of the natural-socioeconomic interactions underpinning China's FEW systems resilience and sustainability. The primary objectives are to: (1) develop CFEW to represent the multi-scale interactions and coevolution of regional FEW systems with climate and hydrologic processes responding to major environmental factors and human interventions; (2) understand key feedback mechanisms driving FEW systems and regional differences linking natural variations with human activities; (3) determine potential thresholds in these systems at which changes to human activities damage China's food, energy and water security and overall system resilience and adaptability, and (4) identify sustainable food and energy production pathways under limited land/water resources along with effective uses of the diversion water to contain these damages.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.