GCR: Collaborative Research: Designing a Sustainable Agricultural Production System through Convergence Research Using a Multi-Scale Ecosystems Approach

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This project addresses the grand challenge of sustainability of food systems, a complex issue that requires deep integration of scientific and engineering disciplines as well as participation by all stakeholders. This project brings together conservation biologists, ecologists, agronomists, farmers, indigenous peoples, economists, social scientists, land managers, and engineers to co-design and implement a framework for testing approaches to sustainable agricultural production. The research team will use this to study the impact in a model system, coffee production, of integrating technological innovations, such as US-built, industrial renewable-energy dryers and clean wet mills that recycle coffee pulp and reduce water pollution, with environmentally-friendly economic development where farmers are compensated for preserving forest on their lands through carbon offset credits, and community-led training and outreach and microcredit programs intended to increase both the participation of women and production. Such a system has the potential to conserve forest critical to reducing carbon emissions, support biodiversity, including migratory birds, and enhance the stability of economic and social conditions. The goal of the project is to develop a framework for convergence research targeting the development of sustainable food systems using the tools of Socio-Ecological Systems, extended to a Multiscale Ecosystem Framework. The research team will construct a multi-scale empirical socio-ecological model of the food production system, identifying the structural elements at all relevant scales, the inter- and intra-scale interactions among those elements, and ecosystem and social services at multiple scales. This model will allow quantification of sustainability metrics under different scenarios. It will be used to identify tradeoffs, synergies and critical points among sustainability indicators and to perform scenario analyses of the impacts of critical exogeneous drivers, including market fluctuations and climate change, on the elements of the system. This project is jointly funded by the Growing Convergence Research Program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).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.