INFEWS/T1: Understanding multi-scale resilience options for vulnerable regions

世界正在经历一场能源革命。集中式电力生产和电网连接正在使全球新兴经济体的城市和工业获得电力的机会成倍增加，而分布式可再生技术则为电网以外的社区提供了机会。这些变化正在改变社会，它们对粮食系统产生不同的影响，并最终影响到从家庭到全球的粮食安全。与此同时，气候变化有可能造成地方和全球水文冲击，在多个层面影响粮食和能源系统。谁将从这一快速变化的粮食、能源和气候格局中受益，谁又可能被抛在后面？技术、投资和政策战略将如何影响这些结果？全球市场动态和大规模气候变化产生的外部冲击如何改变能源和粮食安全发展的进程？这些问题的答案对新兴经济体的发展至关重要，并可能对其境内和境外的社会稳定至关重要。为了理解和预测这些动态，该奖项支持的研究团队将构建一个基于系统的建模框架，以捕获气候变化中的地方规模到国家规模的食物，能源和水动态。该框架将在埃塞俄比亚和马里实施，这两个快速发展但气候高度脆弱的国家可作为更普遍的分析系统的测试案例。美国研究人员将与非洲同行和发展专家合作，开发建模工具，并将其应用于现行和拟议的能源和粮食安全举措，这项工作的最终目标是了解跨尺度的耦合系统动态，以便能够量化关键的人类成果（营养满意度、家庭经济福祉）对发展和气候适应战略的敏感性。研究小组将通过一个综合的多尺度能源和粮食系统（MEFS）建模框架来解决这个问题，该框架包括一个本地的“基于代理的模型”来捕捉个人行为和学习;一个可扩展的多玩家“微观经济局部均衡模型”来模拟区域聚集的决策和结果;以及一个国家可计算的“一般均衡模型”来模拟大规模的政策动态。MEFS结合了这三个模型，这使得研究个人行为和学习在区域聚集决策中的作用成为可能，并量化了自下而上和自上而下的发展干预措施的跨尺度影响，例如家庭太阳能与国家能源补贴。MEFS将为撒哈拉以南非洲地区的粮食-能源-水动力学提供新的见解，而为MEFS开发的新耦合方法将推动多尺度系统建模科学的发展。该项目还包括一个重要的教育组成部分，美国研究生与非洲多所大学的研究生一起参加合作研究和培训。

The world is undergoing an energy revolution. Centralized electricity production and grid connections are multiplying electricity access for cities and industry in emerging economies worldwide, while distributed renewable technologies offer opportunities for communities beyond the grid. These changes are transforming societies and they have diverse impacts on food systems, and ultimately food security, on scales from household to global. At the same time, climate change has the potential to impose both local and global hydrological shocks that affect food and energy systems at multiple levels. Who will benefit from this rapidly changing food, energy, and climate landscape, and who might be left behind? How will technological, investment and policy strategies shape these outcomes? And how might external shocks, arising from global market dynamics and large-scale climate change, alter the course of energy and food security development? The answers to these questions are critical to development in emerging economies and, potentially, to social stability within and beyond their borders. To understand and predict these dynamics, the research team supported by this award will construct a systems-based modeling framework that captures local-scale to national-scale food, energy, and water dynamics in a changing climate. The framework will be implemented for Ethiopia and Mali, two rapidly developing but highly climate vulnerable countries that serve as test cases for a more generalizable analysis system. United States researchers will work with African counterparts and development experts to develop modeling tools and apply them to active and proposed energy and food security initiatives.The ultimate objective of this work is to understand coupled system dynamics across scales in a manner that allows one to quantify the sensitivity of critical human outcomes (nutritional satisfaction, household economic well-being) to development and climate adaptation strategies. The research team will approach this problem with an integrated Multi-scale Energy and Food Systems (MEFS) modeling framework that includes a local "agent-based model" to capture individual behavior and learning; a scalable multi-player "micro-economic partial-equilibrium model" to simulate area-aggregated decisions and outcomes,;and a national computable "general equilibrium model" to simulate large-scale policy dynamics. MEFS couples the three models, which makes it possible to study the role that individual behavior and learning plays in area-aggregated decisions and to quantify the cross-scale impacts of bottom-up and top-down development interventions, such as household-level solar energy versus national energy subsidies. MEFS will provide novel insights on food-energy-water dynamics in the sub-Saharan Africa context, while the novel coupling methods developed for MEFS will advance the science of multi-scale systems modeling for research anywhere. The project also includes a significant educational component in which United States graduate students participate in collaborative research and training with graduate students at multiple African universities.