| NSF Org: |
DEB Division Of Environmental Biology |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 14, 2015 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | August 14, 2015 |
| Award Number: | 1518518 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Betsy Von Holle
mvonholl@nsf.gov (703)292-4974 DEB Division Of Environmental Biology BIO Directorate for Biological Sciences |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2015 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2019 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $1,789,614.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $1,789,614.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
426 AUDITORIUM RD RM 2 EAST LANSING MI US 48824-2600 (517)355-5040 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
1405 S. Harrison Rd. Ste. 115 East Lansing MI US 48823-5289 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | DYN COUPLED NATURAL-HUMAN |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.074 |
ABSTRACT
The globalization of trade in agricultural commodities is increasingly connecting consumers and producers around the world. A growing fraction of forest conversion and other land placed into agricultural production is associated with commodities produced for global markets. Much of the demand for food that was historically met by local agriculture is increasingly being met by global trade; in the past three decades food exports have increased 10-fold. This project will quantify and model this type of global scale connection that links natural and human systems by studying how agricultural markets and land use in China and Brazil are linked via commodity trade. The natural environment is incorporated in this model in two ways: first, the local land use choices affect soil quality and water, which in turn affects subsequent agricultural choices; second, the expansion of agriculture into tropical forest has an effect on global climate and biodiversity. The models produced by this project will increase our understanding of how human and natural systems change in concert even when the connections are over great distances (telecoupled). This project is a first effort to quantify complex dynamics of distantly coupled agricultural and economic systems by going beyond the traditional focus on a single system, one-way impacts, or comparative analysis of systems. It represents an exciting new frontier of research in coupled systems, with substantial contributions to the theory, methods, and applications of telecoupled systems. The work is of further importance in providing a broader view and new perspective on international commodity trade, which is in the national interest, and in training the next generation of scientists
The goal of this proposal is to quantify the telecoupling framework to address fundamental questions about human and natural systems such as: What are the effects of telecouplings on human-nature dynamics across scales in distant systems? How do telecouplings and local couplings enhance or offset each other in terms of their effects on human-nature dynamics? To address these questions and associated hypotheses, the project will focus on major telecouplings involving the trade of agricultural products (e.g., soybeans for food and animal feed) between Brazil and China, two of the world's most important emerging economies. These two countries constitute an excellent example of telecoupled systems, but little is known about the effects of their rapidly increasing trade on human-nature dynamics. By leveraging existing remote sensing and socioeconomic data and collecting complementary new data, researchers will model complex dynamics and relationships among key components of telecoupled systems. Analyses at the international and national scales will be conducted with the widely used Global Trade Analysis Project model. They will be complemented by in-depth studies at the regional and local scales through ecological fieldwork and socioeconomic surveys, as well as through developing and validating a telecoupled agent-based model. These studies, spanning local to international scales, will be joined via systems integration.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The demand for food, which was historically met by local agriculture, is increasingly being met by the trade of agricultural commodities. While the production of agricultural commodities for global markets is increasingly connecting consumers and producers around the world, it is also inducing a significant transformation from natural to agricultural land cover types worldwide, with multiple socioeconomic and environmental consequences. Thus, it is crucial to evaluate how these global telecouplings (socioeconomic-environmental interactions across distances) influence human and natural systems. This project quantified and modeled how agricultural markets and land use in China and Brazil are linked via the trade of soybeans, a major agricultural commodity. These two emergent economies constitute an excellent example of telecoupled systems. Because the economy of every nation is linked with each other through telecoupling processes such as trade, while each national economy is underpinned by a full set of intermediate input demands, it was necessary to perform multiscale analyses. Thus, using the telecoupling framework applied through the lens of the soybean trade, the project analyzed the socio-economic and environmental links between China and Brazil at international/national and regional/local scales, as well as spillover nations such as the USA. For the international/national scale, the project developed a modified global general equilibrium model to investigate the economic and environmental impacts of sector- and region-specific agricultural/environmental policies acting simultaneously with the global trade. For the regional/local scale, the project developed an agent-based model to conceptualize and analyze the impacts of the global agricultural trade on land-use decision-making processes. In addition, a suite of on-line software tools were developed to allow different stakeholders operationalize the telecoupling framework and systematically explore complex interactions (Telecoupling Toolbox - http://telecouplingtoolbox.org).
The project resulted in numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals that contributed to the advancement of multiple academic disciplines, including land change science, ecosystem services, ecology, economics, international trade, coupled human and natural systems, conservation science, sustainability and agriculture. For example, the project made advances in our understanding of land use and cover dynamics and their environmental consequences (e.g., changes in soil nutrients, energy use and carbon sequestration), as well as in the incorporation of the telecoupling framework on research and management of natural resources and ecosystem services. The project also advanced our understanding of the main socioeconomic drivers in telecoupled systems. For instance, results of the project showed that when examining the drivers of China's high soybean demand - which contributed to significant land use change not only in China but also in Brazil - macroeconomic growth was found to be the most important component. And it is not just macroeconomic developments in a single country that matter. Brazil's rapid growth in agricultural productivity not only fueled the expansion of soybean exports to China, but also had a significant dampening effect on soybean production in the United States. These basic principles also carry over to the analyses of other types of telecouplings and policy interventions in other regions, such as the link between European palm oil consumption and land conversion/carbon emissions in Indonesia. Therefore, the telecoupling framework and analytical tools developed under this project can be applied in many different geographic and economic contexts.
Junior scholars (post-docs, graduate students) working in the project benefitted widely through the project's international and multi-disciplinary research collaborations, while also obtained hands-on experience on field data collection, data management and data analysis. These scholars were also trained on how to communicate research results in professional meetings, peer-reviewed journals and to the general public through social media and global news media. The project personnel also interacted with multiple stakeholders (including those along the agricultural commodity production chain) in our focus study regions in China and Brazil. These interactions not only provided information suitable for assessing their decision making processes, but also contributed to the broad dissemination of the project's findings.
Last Modified: 11/29/2019
Modified by: Andres Vina
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