FEW: Coupling Economic Models with Agronomic, Hydrologic, and Bioenergy Models for Sustainable Food, Energy, and Water Systems

维持可持续的粮食、能源和水的质量和数量的新挑战显然即将出现，因为气候模型的预测表明，一些拥有高产农田的地区将越来越多地面临干旱和洪水条件。人口增长和土地用途的迅速变化也威胁到农业生产用地。需要制定旨在适应和减轻这些变化影响的政策，以减少这些影响。然而，很明显，粮食、能源和水（FEW）系统是相互依存的。将这些系统视为土地、水和能源与粮食生产的单向耦合，忽略了关键的反馈回路和根本的权衡。对这些系统之间的经济和政策联系进行建模将是理解FEW系统之间相互作用的重要手段。 不了解相关生物物理和经济系统之间的反馈，可能会导致严重的不良和意外后果。整合经济和生物物理模型是一项迫切需要的进步，可以为支持合理的政策设计提供宝贵的工具。为了开始开发所需的生物物理和经济学模型的整合，爱荷华州州立大学将举办为期两天的会议，将主要的经济学家和统计学家与作物科学家，水文学家，气候科学家和其他生物物理建模师聚集在一起，以确定与理解FEW系统相关的关键科学，工程和数据挑战。会议的具体目标是：（1）确定构成FEW系统的个体行为、生物和自然系统中建模能力和科学理解的关键差距，（2）确定构成FEW系统的行为、生物和自然系统之间模型联系的关键挑战，（3）确定在估计这些单独和关联模型用于预测和预测政策决定结果时的准确性方面的主要统计和计量经济学挑战，（4）确定在系统的各个组成部分中开发所需建模能力所需的关键数据和网络基础设施挑战，并实现FEW系统建模组成部分之间的联系，以及（5）确定调整和使用这些模型以纳入气候变化的关键挑战。

New challenges to maintaining sustainable food, energy, and water quality and quantity are clearly on the horizon as projections from climate models suggest that some regions with highly productive agricultural lands will increasingly face both drought and flood conditions. Population growth and rapid land use change also threaten productive agricultural land. Policies aimed at adapting to and mitigating the effects of these changes will be needed to reduce the impacts. However, it has become clear that food, energy, and water (FEW) systems are integrally interdependent. Treating these systems as a uni-directional coupling of land, water, and energy to food production omits critical feedback loops and fundamental tradeoffs. Modeling the economic and policy linkages across these systems will be an important means of understanding the interactions across the FEW system. Failure to understand the feedbacks between the relevant biophysical and economic systems can lead to significant undesirable and unintended consequences. Integrating economic and biophysical models is a much needed advancement and could provide valuable tools to support sound policy design. In order to begin to develop the needed integration of biophysical and economics models, Iowa State University will host a two day conference to bring leading economists and statisticians together with crop scientists, hydrologists, climate scientists, and other biophysical modelers to identify the key scientific, engineering and data challenges associated with understanding the FEW system. The specific goals of the conference are to: (1) identify the key gaps in modeling capabilities and scientific understanding within the individual behavioral, biological, and natural systems that comprise the FEW system, (2) identify key challenges in model linkages across the behavioral, biological, and natural systems that comprise the FEW system, (3) identify the major statistical and econometric challenges in estimating the accuracy of these individual and linked models when they are used for forecasting and for predicting the outcomes of policy decisions, (4) identify the key data and cyberinfrastructure challenges required to develop the needed modeling capabilities within individual components of the system and to achieve linkages across the modeling components of the FEW system, and (5) identify key challenges in adapting and using these models to incorporate climate change.