Balancing environmental impacts and economic benefits of agriculture under the climate change through an integrated optimization system

Abstract

The present study proposes a framework to mitigate impact of climate change on the rice production by maximizing the yield while the energy use and ecological impacts on the river ecosystem as the irrigation source are mitigated. Coupled general circulation model- soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) was utilized to project the impact of climate change on the stream flow. Fuzzy physical habitat simulation was applied to develop the ecological impact function of the river. Moreover, a data-driven model was developed to predict the rice yield through changing water and energy consumption. Finally, all the simulations were utilized in the structure of the optimization model in which minimizing loss of the production, greenhouse gas emission by reducing energy use and physical habitat loss were considered as the objectives. Based on the results, the Nash–Sutcliffe model efficiency coefficient of the SWAT is 0.7 that demonstrates its reliability for simulating the impact of climate change on river flow. The optimization model is able to reduce the impact of climate change on yield of production by balancing water and energy use. In the most pessimistic scenario, water use should approximately be reduced 25% for protecting river ecosystem. However, the optimization model approximately increased energy use 16% for preserving the yield of the rice. Conversely, model decreased the energy use 40% compared with the current condition due to increasing water supply. Moreover, physical habitat loss is less than 50% that means the combined optimization model is able to protect river habitats properly.