INFEWS: U.S.-China: Integrated systems modeling for sustainable FEW nexus under multi-factor global changes: Innovative comparison between Yellow River and Mississippi River Basins

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Food, energy, and water (FEW) are essential to sustain human life and well-being. To meet the growing demands of human population that is expected to reach 9.6 billion by 2050, the global and regional capability in providing abundant and affordable FEW will be increasingly important to social stability and economic development. Excessive nitrogen loading to water systems during food production has long been a serious problem for humans to access clean water, while the increasing water demand by energy production further exacerbates water scarcity and pollution. This project addresses an important research challenge at the FEW nexus: How can we balance Food-Energy-clean Water (FEWc) production, both spatially and temporally, with limited resources and changing environment? The project focus is on the Mississippi River Basin (MRB) in the U.S. and the Yellow River Basin (YRB) in China because these two basins are of global importance and are facing paramount challenges in meeting the growing demands for FEW. MRB, the largest river basin in North America, drains about 41% of the conterminous U.S. and most of the U.S. Corn Belt. The YRB, the second largest river basin in China, drains 11.5% of land area in China and is a key food and energy-producing region supporting 107 million residents. Research outcomes from this project will shed light on optimizing resource use efficiencies and predicting FEWc sustainability in the context of multiple-factor global changes including climate change, air pollution, urbanization, land and water use changes, and social-economic development. This project will foster science communication and stakeholder engagement for critical issues in the FEWc nexus, through summer school program, workshops and conferences, and university's broad strategy of external engagement in both U.S. and China. This project will also assist policymakers in making informed decisions regarding future policies that will enhance the quality and quantity of food, energy, and clean water.The overarching goal of this project is to understand and quantify the complex interactions and feedbacks within the FEWc system towards a basin-scale sustainable FEW provision (that is, to optimize resource allocation for maximizing crop production and energy generation and minimizing water pollution). The project will build an integrated systems modeling framework that incorporates crop, hydrological-biogeochemical, energy, and economic models, to advance our understanding and quantification of the complex interactions within the FEWc nexus, and predict FEWc sustainability under future climate and resource use scenarios at a basin level. The integrated systems model will be tested on the MRB (a Clean Water-targeted FEW) and the YRB (a Water Conservation-targeted FEW), to examine the limiting factors of FEWc nexus in these two intensively-managed while contrasting river basins. Through modeling assessment and predictions, the U.S.-China joint research team will test a series of hypotheses on spatiotemporal variations in limiting factors, sustainability of FEWc, and management potentials across these two river basins from 1960 to 2050. Benefiting from a U.S.-China joint program, such between-basin comparison will test different emphasis of FEWc connections, and form a quantitative and computational modeling tool that is applicable to other intensively-managed landscapes with similar FEWc conflicts across the world. The project will 1) characterize the FEWc dynamics and the mechanisms underlying natural and anthropogenic driving forces; 2) build an integrated systems modeling framework that simulates interactions, feedback, and socioeconomic constraints of FEWc at a basin scale; 3) assess and predict the roles of resource use and management practices in pursuit of FEWc in the context of global changes. The management options verified by this modeling framework will potentially change cultivation practices, energy structure, and most importantly, increase supply of clean water to inhabitants.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.