Agent-Based Modelling of Food Production for Water Stewardship: an Overview
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Agent-Based Modelling of Food Production for Water Stewardship: an Overview Huirong Yu 1 & Pengfei Du 1 Accepted: 3 November 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Keywords Water-use behavior . Water stewardship . Agent-based modelling . Resource sustainability . Food-water nexus
Introduction Food production is the key consumer and polluter of global water. It has been estimated that at least 70% of humanwithdrawn freshwater is used to produce food for human needs (Falkenmark et al. 2004; Newborne and Dalton 2016; Willett et al. 2019). Over the past decades, growing population and changing dietary patterns have increased global demand for food (FAO 2017), which not only leads to greater water consumption, but also puts water quality at higher risk. Intensive farming to address increasing food demand entails irrigation that accounts for the largest proportion of water use worldwide. In addition, intensive farming differs from traditional farming with crop diversity and low external input in that it favors monoculture cultivation or concentrated breeding with high external agro-chemical input (Hajer et al. 2016). Research has shown that the largest volume of global wastewater is generated from food production and intensive farming aggravates this problem (Mateo-Sagasta et al. 2018). For the past 6 years (2015–2020) the World Economic Forum has listed water crises among the top five global risks (World Economic Forum 2020). Current food production practices are expected to heighten this risk (FAO 2017), which in turn will threaten food production and consequently human wellbeing (Lu et al. 2015). There are increasing calls to promote water stewardship as a priority in water resource management to ensure sustainability (Floress et al. 2017; Everard 2019). Compared with traditional approaches to efficient water resource management, water stewardship focuses on stakeholders as responsible moral agents in the use and sustainability of water resources (Beavis 1994). Conventional efficiency-focus approaches that * Pengfei Du [email protected] 1
School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
ignore human behavior may lead to a “tragedy of the commons” scenario (i.e., individual maximizing of self-interest will inevitably lead to overuse of water resources) (Zogheib et al. 2018) and Jevons’ paradox (i.e., improvement of water use efficiency can in fact have the effect of increasing water consumption in food production) (Alcott et al. 2012; Sun et al. 2016). It is imperative to incorporate considerations of human behavior to implement effective stewardship of water use in food production and to secure sustainability (Cosgrove and Loucks 2015). Agent-based modelling (ABM) is a computational method of simulating human systems (Bonabeau 2002). We present an overview of agent-based models (ABMs) and their applications in food production with a focus on water use and identify the potentials and challenges of ABM in shaping effective water stewardship.
ABM as a Tool to Fa
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