Food Security and Land Use: The Telecoupling Challenge

Lead Research Organisation: King's College London
Department Name: Geography

Abstract

The Telecoupling Consortium, consists of four focal countries (Brazil, China, U.K. and U.S.), vulnerable spillover countries in Africa, two major CGIAR centers (CIAT and IFPRI) , FAO and extensive stakeholder involvement. We apply an
innovative integrative framework, Telecoupling - socioeconomic and environmental interactions among coupled human and
natural systems at different scales over great distances - that can transform how we think about collateral effects from
international trade on food security and land use dynamics. We address Theme 3 (Feedback Loops), focusing on major
commodities central to food security: rice, corn, wheat, soybeans, potato, biofuel crops (mainly sugarcane and corn) and
livestock. We will examine processes at different scales, from the international trade in major food commodities, to in-depth
studies at regional/local scales. The Consortium partners bring to this project a very large portfolio of food security and land
use projects, representing four continents, while providing a much needed framework to address how food systems change
across large distances, and to account for socioeconomic and environmental consequences of shifting forms of food
production, trade and distribution. The team includes leading scholars in social and natural sciences as well as influential
stakeholders in relevant sectors. The end result of this project will be enhanced capacity to predict effects from shifts in
food flows and land use; tools to facilitate policy changes to improve food security, while ensuring a more sustainable
environment; increased cooperation among major research and stakeholder groups in major food production and
consuming countries; and training a new generation alert to minimizing negative consequences from changes in land use
worldwide. The project will provide a comprehensive framework, a complex systems modeling approach and a Web-based
Decision Support System to finding solutions that enhance food security for all, while ensuring a sustainable earth.

Planned Impact

The Telecoupling Consortium will have a major impact on global food security by engaging a multilevel set of stakeholders in the co-design, co-production, and co-implementation of actionable science. Stakeholders will include the research community, food production, food distribution and government organizations, global gatekeepers such as FAO, and consumer organizations.

We will engage from the start of the project representatives of major commodity producers and food distributors, since food security is not just a production challenge, but also increasingly, it is a distribution challenge. Major companies, associations, and cooperatives play an important role in how food commodities move within a country and from one country to another, and have notable capabilities for contracting with farmers across many countries for their production, predicting harvests across the world, and making crucial decisions in food systems. Identifying key interactions in the global food system will enables these stakeholders to better understand the impacts of their actions and decisions on others, and how through feedbacks across space and time, those actions and decisions result in consequences for their own interests at layer points in time.

In each nation there is at least one ministry charged with overseeing national agricultural policies. Sometimes there are several that touch on agriculture since that sector produces not only food but also energy, and fibre. In each focal country in the project we will constitute a stakeholder group that will be consulted in the co-design of research and the co-production of analyses for each country to ensure that the results have relevance for the partner countries. Through this engagement, our research and findings will help government organizations to better understand the dynamics of the global food and land system such that possible policy levers can be identified to ensure food security and environmental sustainability.

Food consumers represent the demand side of the food system, and the ones who are ultimately vulnerable should the food system fail to deliver adequate food to meet human well-being. Consumers' demands are shifting as societies develop economically, and predicting the direction of these dietary preferences has a major role to play in how land use changes, and how food flows across the globe. Engaging with consumers ensure improvements in their understanding of the impacts of decisions often made far away from the point at which food is obtained, and how global food and land systems are linked and influence environmental sustainability.

Across all of these groups, the expected impacts of stakeholder engagement include providing a holistic systems views of food security and land use; prediction of collateral effects of food trade flows on vulnerable countries; facilitation of policy change and improvement; dissemination of research findings to multiple audiences through mass- and social-media worldwide; and the fostering of robust cooperation across major food producing countries to increase food production and distribution, income to farmers, and reduction of environmental impacts among others.

Publications

10 25 50
 
Description The development of an innovative telecoupling simulation model is a central task in the project, interfacing between the other project tasks (undertaken by project collaborators). We have conceptualized and implemented a model structure that represents interactions between generalized agents at multiple, hierarchical levels of organization to simulate telecoupling among distant coupled human and natural systems through food production, trade, and consumption. The development of this model structure has been in the context of an initial example of telecoupling in the global food system - the trade of soybeans between Brazil and China (and to a lesser extent the U.S.) and consequent impacts on land use - but is transferable to other food commodities. The development of the conceptual structure drew on discussions with stakeholders and is linked to diagrams produced during the mental modelling sessions that have taken place with stakeholders (see below).

Alongside developing the conceptual model structure we have needed innovate technically to implement the simulation model. Quantitatively simulating telecoupled links across multiple scales and levels is challenged by data availability and compatibility of aggregating vs disaggregating conceptual frameworks. For example, previous approaches to modelling international food trade have often used top-down approaches such as partial-equilibrium economic models, whereas recent approaches to representing local land use have widely used bottom-up agent-based modelling. Systems dynamics and global value-chain approaches are also available to represent aggregated flows and stores of products and values between distant locations. Our work has revealed that some of these existing tools and approaches are not suitable for modelling the processes we must consider, but also that others are suitable and that in some cases multiple approaches might be possible.

We have pursued alternative approaches for representing international trade; economic equilibrium modelling and systems dynamics modelling. To represent international trade in equilibrium models two approaches are widely adopted - the international market clearing approach and the Armington approach - but we have established that neither of these alone was appropriate for our modelling needs (and have developed a bespoke alternative approach).

Mental models make explicit understandings of stakeholder about the operation of the socio-ecological system we are studying. Mental models were developed and tested by collaborators during fieldwork and interviews with stakeholders in the US and Brazil. These activities produced numerous findings including:
- Brazilian soy production is impacted negatively by climatic events (such as drought) and plagues;
- Brazilian production is incentivised by Chinese and other traders' demand as well as the current price of soy (to the producer);
- The farm gate price of soy is currently affected by the efficiency of transportation and storage in the different regions, yet the way in which this efficiency (or lack of it) affect the price is not clear;
- good planting approach (use of the correct techniques) and quality road and railways can decrease production costs, while the privatization of transportation, distance to distribution centres and use of technological packages increase costs.

The agent-based component of simulation model we have developed has been calibrated with empirical data to reproduced observed land cover/use and agricultural production across our Brazilian study area. This component has been linked to a system dynamics component that represents global food commodity trade. We are using the model to examine scenarios of future variation in global food demand, agricultural yields and climate change.
Exploitation Route Our current findings are a start towards enabling other modellers and non-academic stakeholders to take a holistic systems views of food security and land use and to offer quantitative information on telecoupling effects.
Sectors Agriculture

Food and Drink

Environment

 
Title CRAFTY Brazil 
Description An implementation of the CRAFTY ABM simulation model for our Brazilian study area. 
Type Of Material Computer model/algorithm 
Year Produced 2020 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact None yet 
URL https://github.com/jamesdamillington/CRAFTY_Brazil
 
Title FLUTE Maestro 
Description Application to communicate and co-ordinate between CRAFTY Brazil and BioLUC models 
Type Of Material Computer model/algorithm 
Year Produced 2019 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact None yet 
URL https://github.com/jamesdamillington/FLUTE_Maestro
 
Title Transport Cost to Ports through Brazilian Federal Roads Networks: Dataset for years 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2017 
Description Transport costs can play a significant role in agricultural exports and businesses profitability. It can also influence farmers' decisions regarding cropland expansion, intensification or land abandonment. Thus, transport is useful to take into account when modeling and evaluating land use and cover change related to agriculture production. The dataset described in this article represents the Infrastructure Capital in the work presented by Millington et al (2020), in which the CRAFTY-Brazil model is used to evaluate the impacts of changing global demand for agricultural products on land use and cover change. This modeling required a transport cost dataset that spanned the model calibration period, was consistent through time and covered the entire study area. The mos recent road network (for year 2017) obtained in vector format (shapefile) was joined to road section surface status tables for past years (2000, 2005 and 2010) in order to reconstruct the historic road network. Export ports hadling agricultural commodities, and their years of operation, were identified. Both datasets were used to derive the relative transport cost to the nearest port for Brazil, for years 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2017. 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2020 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact Necessary for the construction of our simulation model 
URL https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/6xbjzyz3th/1
 
Description Agent-based approaches to modelling telecoupled systems 
Organisation Free University of Amsterdam
Country Netherlands 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution I contributed expertise and insights from our large-scale agent-based modelling approach to help guide a smaller-scale agent-based model. This contributed to a paper co-authored with our collaborators.
Collaborator Contribution Yue Dou contributed her expertise and insights from her modelling project to aid development of ours. She also shared useful data sources.
Impact One paper, doi: 10.1080/1747423X.2019.1687769 One webinar: https://glp.earth/news-events/blog/challenge-modelling-telecoupled-land-use-change
Start Year 2016
 
Title Brazil Agri Analysis 
Description Analysis of Brazil agricultural commodities data for CRAFTY-Brazil modelling project 
Type Of Technology Software 
Year Produced 2020 
Open Source License? Yes  
URL https://zenodo.org/record/3746124
 
Title Brazil Agri Analysis 
Description Analysis of Brazil agricultural commodities data for CRAFTY-Brazil modelling project 
Type Of Technology Software 
Year Produced 2020 
Open Source License? Yes  
URL https://zenodo.org/record/3746125
 
Title CRAFTY-Brazil 
Description An implementation of the CRAFTY ABM simulation model across a Brazilian study area 
Type Of Technology Software 
Year Produced 2020 
Open Source License? Yes  
URL https://zenodo.org/record/3746072
 
Title CRAFTY-Brazil Input Maps 
Description Manipulating MapBiomas (version 4) data for land cover maps to use in CRAFTY-Brazil simulation model 
Type Of Technology Software 
Year Produced 2019 
Open Source License? Yes  
URL https://zenodo.org/record/3549787
 
Title CRAFTY-Brazil Input Maps 
Description Manipulating MapBiomas (version 4) data for land cover maps to use in CRAFTY-Brazil simulation model 
Type Of Technology Software 
Year Produced 2019 
Open Source License? Yes  
URL https://zenodo.org/record/3549788
 
Title CRAFTY-Brazil Inputs 
Description Scripts to create input files for CRAFTY-Brazil simulation model 
Type Of Technology Software 
Year Produced 2020 
Open Source License? Yes  
URL https://zenodo.org/record/3746050
 
Title CRAFTY-Brazil Inputs 
Description Scripts to create input files for CRAFTY-Brazil simulation model 
Type Of Technology Software 
Year Produced 2020 
Open Source License? Yes  
URL https://zenodo.org/record/3746049
 
Title jamesdamillington/CRAFTY_Brazil: Docker Release 
Description Updated version to enable execution in docker (with Maestro_Solo https://github.com/jamesdamillington/Maestro_Solo). Model logic is unchanged from previous releases. 
Type Of Technology Software 
Year Produced 2021 
URL https://zenodo.org/record/3746071
 
Description Visits with agricultural producer groups 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact Our work was presented and discussed with representatives of groups including Aprosoja (Soy Producers Association of Brazil), IMEA (Mato Grosso Institute of Agricultural Economics) and SENAR-MT (National Service for Rural Learning of Mato Grosso State).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019