Farm decisions under dynamic meteorology and the curse of complexity

Publication Type

Conference proceedings

Authors

Arnold T., Uribe H., Troost C., Berger T.

Year of publication

2010

Published in

Modelling for Environment's Sake: Proceedings of the 5th Biennial Conference of the International Environmental Modelling and Software Society, iEMSs 2010

Band/Volume

3/

Page (from - to)

2393-2400

Conference name

5th Biennial Conference of the International Environmental Modelling and Software Society: Modelling for Environment's Sake, iEMSs 2010

Conference location

Ottawa, Canada

Conference date

July 5 - 8, 2010

Keywords

sustainability

For agricultural production, climate change will have the greatest impact on water availability. At the same time, rural farming communities are at the heart of poverty reduction strategies. Furthermore, healthy rural societies must be maintained to contain urbanization and associated sprawl. Thus, sustainable adaptation strategies must take into account the complexity of societal responses. However, scientific tools to assess such interactions are lacking. A promising approach is the integration of data and models across scientific disciplines and in collaboration with local stakeholders. Empirical, process-oriented models can even quantify these interactions and feedback. As a contribution to this challenge, the project 'Integrating governance and modeling' combined the agricultural economics multi-agent farm decision model MPMAS and the hydrological model WASIM-ETH dynamically. Models were calibrated empirically, with increasing level of detail and interactions. The stepwise and iterative integration/calibration of these coupled models allowed for sensitivity assessment across disciplines but it also pointed to the relevance of knowledge gaps along disciplinary divides: production risk at multiple decision horizons, the unequal susceptibility of different marketing venues in case of production failures, and farmers' unequal access to water under fluctuating supply.