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

人类-自然系统在食物、能源和水的结合点(很少)的弹性受到环境变化的威胁，例如气候极端情况的增加、不断增长的人口需求和不断变化的土地利用。改善美国和中国的农业、经济和环境可持续性的可行战略必须通过更好地了解他们与气候的相互作用如何影响耦合的少数系统的演变来制定。该研究项目整合了气候、水文、农学、生物地球化学、工程和经济科学方面的最先进知识和建模能力。调查将建立一个框架，切实地将水、碳和氮循环过程与农业实践、资源管理和政府政策相结合、预测和应用，以解决区域少数系统的脆弱性、复原力和可持续性等关键问题。美国和中国的比较将确定人类活动在增强或降低少数系统弹性方面的重要性，从而为引导粮食和能源作物生产的可持续资源利用提供科学决策支持。该项目包括一个国际交流计划，以支持跨学科研究框架中的下一代科学家的教育，在该框架中，思想的交叉滋养是核心。学生将参与该项目的各个方面，并与美国和中国团队的资深科学家合作，为这些训练有素的研究人员培养对未来至关重要的新方法。该项目的总体目标是开发、评估和应用一个耦合建模框架来解决中国的粮食生产-能源开发-供水系统的适应性问题。该框架将纳入黄河流域的环境变化和人类活动，那里对这些系统的需求存在尖锐冲突。这项研究将包括主要粮食和生物能源作物的生产；水电、煤炭储备和生物质原料的能源开发；以及包括水库调度、防洪和灌溉战略在内的供水管理。建议的方法明确纳入了相互依存、以人为本和极端假设，以使人们能够更深入地理解支撑中国的少数几个系统的弹性和可持续性的自然-社会-经济相互作用。其主要目标是：(1)开发CFEW，以代表气候和水文过程对主要环境因素和人类干预作出反应的区域少数系统的多尺度相互作用和共同进化；(2)了解驱动少数系统和区域差异的关键反馈机制，将自然变化与人类活动联系起来；(3)确定这些系统中人类活动的变化损害中国的食品、能源和水安全以及整体系统复原力和适应性的潜在阈值，以及(4)确定在有限的土地/水资源下的可持续食品和能源生产途径，以及有效利用引水来遏制这些损害。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.