The Impact of Environmental and Climate Constraints on Global Food Supply

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The goal of this Chapter is to study the complex interaction between agriculture, economic growth and the environment, given future uncertainties. We combine economic concepts and biophysical constraints in one consistent modeling framework to be able to quantify and analyze the long-term socio-economic and environmental consequences of different scenarios. Here, we present the innovative methodology of coupling an economic and a biophysical model to combine state of the art knowledge from economic and biophysical sources. First, a comprehensive representation of the agricultural and land markets is required in the economic model. Therefore we included a land demand structure to reflect the degree of substitutability of types of land-use types and we included a land supply curve to include the process of land conversion and land abandonment. Secondly, the adapted economic model (LEITAP) is linked to the biophysical-based integrated assessment model IMAGE allowing to feed back spatially and temporarily varying land productivity to the economic framework. Thirdly, the land supply curves in the economic model are parameterized by using the heterogeneous information of land productivity from IMAGE. This link between an economic and biophysical model benefits from the strengths of both models. The economic model captures features of the global food market, including relations between world regions, whereas the bio-physical model adds geographical explicit information on crop growth within each world region. An illustrative baseline analyses shows the environmental consequences of the default baseline and a sensitivity analyses is performed with regard to the land supply curve. Results indicate that economic and environmental consequences are very dependent on whether a country is land scarce or land abundant. The introduction of an endogenous land supply curve has therefore important implications for analyses of the impact of climate, agricultural and trade policy reforms as it changes the impacts for the different countries.