The National Science Foundation awarded $2.5 million to an interdisciplinary team led by Thomas Hertel, a Purdue distinguished professor of agricultural economics, to build the tools necessary to understand the global-local-global linkages underpinning future sustainability policies. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture provided an additional $500,000 to enhance the economic foundations of this framework. 

David Johnson, an assistant professor of industrial engineering and political science, is the co-principal investigator.

“Agriculture is experiencing sustainability stresses related to land, water quality and water availability, and those will intensify in the future. Most of the drivers of those stresses will be global, and we need to understand how those affect local communities,” Hertel said. “As we look at potential solutions, we need to know what is most feasible, the side-effects and how those will feed back to the global economy.”

The funding supports the work of the Global-to-Local Analysis of Systems Sustainability (GLASS) initiative, led by Hertel and aimed at understanding the linkages between local decision-making and global sustainability outcomes. This will allow the team to explore a policy’s ramifications in a holistic way. Made up of Purdue economists, political scientists, hydrologists, climate scientists, computer scientists and others, the team grew out of Discovery Park’s Purdue’s Big Idea Challenge, which funded interdisciplinary research on global challenges and life-changing innovations.

Johnson is focusing on trade-offs across different environmental and economic objectives within the food-energy-water systems and potential unforeseen consequences. He said he’s searching for win-win policies that could lead to more sustainable agricultural practices without sacrificing the ability to feed rapidly growing global populations.

“Local policies must be evaluated at a global scale to truly understand their impacts,” Johnson said. “For example, restricting groundwater irrigation in the Great Plains could reduce unsustainable depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, but it could also increase food prices and lead to deforestation elsewhere in the world. Wherever regulation makes crop production less efficient, we have to think carefully about where production might shift to meet global demand.”

Already, the GLASS team’s work has offered suggestions for reducing deforestation related to palm oil production in Malaysia and Indonesia. Findings reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that those countries would suffer economically if they don’t take leadership of the efforts to stop deforestation.

Ongoing and future projects will look at alternative policies to limit nitrate leaching in the Corn Belt as well as assessing the impacts of efforts to limit groundwater drawdown in the Western United States.

Writer: Brian Wallheimer, 765-532-0233, bwallhei@purdue.edu

Source: Thomas Hertel, 765-494-4199, hertel@purdue.edu; David Johnson, 765-494-7122, davidjohnson@purdue.edu

From: "Purdue team gets $3 million to explore consequences of sustainability policies", Purdue University Agriculture News (Sept. 11, 2019)