Methodology and Models

Apart from standard off-the-shelf type models, Land Use Change and Agriculture (LUC) program staff direct substantial efforts toward formulating methodology and developing and enhancing the associated models. Models developed and used in LUC research include a world food system model or "Basic Linked System" (BLS) as well as sequential downscaling and up-scaling models used for various purposes, including downscaling of agricultural statistics, the agro-ecological zones modeling framework for assessing agricultural and bio-energy potentials, hydrological run-off models and so on.

Basic Linked System
The BLS provides a framework for analyzing the world food system, viewing national agricultural systems as embedded in national economies, which in turn interact with each other at the international level. The model consists of 34 national and regional geographical components. The individual models are linked by means of a world market. The model is formulated as a recursively dynamic system, working in annual steps, the outcome of each step affected by the outcomes of earlier ones. Each individual model covers the whole economy of the respective geographical area. For the purpose of international linkage, production, consumption, and trade are aggregated to nine agricultural sectors and one non-agricultural sector. All physical and financial accounts are balanced and mutually consistent: the production, consumption, and financial ones at the national level, and the trade and financial flows at the global level. More.

Agro-Ecological Zoning
The agro ecological zones methodology (AEZ), which was developed by IIASA together with the UN Food and Agriculture Organizaiton (FAO), follows an environmental approach. It provides a standardized framework for the characterization of climate, soil, and terrain conditions relevant to agricultural production. Crop modeling and environmental matching procedures are used to identify crop-specific limitations of prevailing climate, soil and terrain resources under assumed levels of inputs and management conditions. More.

Economic Ecological Modeling Framework
This modeling approach, which comprises an integration of AEZ and BLS, connects the relevant bio-physical and socio-economic variables within a unified and coherent framework to produce global assessments of food production and security.

Spatial Downscaling
LUC developed sequential downscaling and upscaling procedures to address the problem of data scarcity and incompleteness and ensure the required spatio-temporal resolutions and heterogeneities. To represent information in locations, the procedures rely on an appropriate optimization principle and combine the available samples of real observations in the locations with other “prior” hard and soft data (expert opinion, scenarios), pseudo-sampling models, evidences on the related variables that exist in the form of interdependent observable, partially observable or indirectly observable and non-observable variables on all scales. Of particular importance for downscaling is distribution-free non-parametric estimation of spatio-temporal interdependencies among the variables. More.

Climate and Human Activities-sensitive Runoff Model (pdf)
The Climate- and Human Activities-sensitive Runoff Model (CHARM) is a simplified rainfall-runoff model developed to assess water availability over large regions where very little data is available.  The model calculates a gridded daily soil water balance including components for evapotranspiration, stormflow, surface and sub-surface runoff based on the limited climate, soil, and terrain data available from global datasets.  Under the CHINAGRO project, CHARM was applied to assess water availability and demand in China, to develop water cost and supply curves for large basins in China, and to look at the impacts of watershed development and climate change on water availability and evaporation from reservoir surfaces. More (pdf).

Catastrophic Risks and Integrated Management (CRIM) Model
Geographically explicit model for integrated management of catastrophic risks and sustainable regional planning More.

Agricultural Production Planning and Allocation(APPA) Model
Industrialization of agriculture has a number of comparative advantages however adverse implications such as environmental impacts, decrease of rural welfare, health hazards, GHG emissions establish the need to identify pathways to sustainable agriculture. Our model is a geographically detailed stochastic and dynamic model for spatio-temporal planning of livestock and crop production sector to meet food security goals under risks and resource constraints, and ambient targets.

Emission Trading (ET) Model
Environment is a global public good with high demand for and limited supply of, which requires proper regulations of environmental security. Economic instruments for environmental regulations become popular both among policy-makers and scientific communities. Prominent example of adopted economic instruments is emissions trading schemes. These schemes play important role in climate change policy negotiations. Unfortunately, existing carbon markets are volatile and operate at disequilibrium prices, which do not ensure cost-efficient and environmentally safe trades

Responsible for this page: Elisabeth Kawczynski
Last updated: 22 Dec 2011
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