Hybrid modelling to evaluate food security and relationships between producer and reciever countries

What is it about?

This paper has been developed through a collaboration between a number of partners in our 5 year Belmont Telecoupling project ‘Food Security and Land Use: The Telecoupling Challenge.’ Telecoupling is a novel analytical framework based on an integrated concept that emphasises socioeconomic and environmental interactions between distant places. Viewed through the lens of the telecoupling framework, land use and food consumption are linked across local to global scales by decision-making agents and trade flows. Quantitatively modelling the dynamics of telecoupled systems like this could be achieved using numerous different modelling approaches. In this work we build on the conceptual problems identified in Kline et al (2016; above) to assess whether a hybrid modelling approach to food commodity supply and demand can more robustly model future food provision across global scales.

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Why is it important?

Historically, conventional modelling approaches have struggeled to represent the historic interactions between food production (supplier) and consumption (demander) countries well and in particular the land use change dymanics. This makes it difficult to derive useful and robust recommendations to improve food security at national to global levels. For example, previous approaches to modelling global food trade have often used partial equilibrium economic models, whereas recent approaches to representing local land use decision-making have widely used agent-based modelling. System dynamics models are well established for representing aggregated flows and stores of products and values between distant locations. In the paper we argue that hybrid computational models will be useful for capitalising on the strengths these different modelling approaches each have for representing the various concepts in the telecoupling framework. However, integrating multiple modelling approaches into hybrid models faces challenges, including data requirements and uncertainty assessment. This paper outlines these challenges and develops a conceptual framework for implementing the proposed hybrid modelling approach identified through the Belmont Telecoupling Project.