GLASSNET’s impact on key stakeholders will make a difference in achieving the SDGs. Our network has the potential to provide decision makers from a wide-array of areas with the data needed to properly assess actions that will affect the environment, the economy and local communities.
Learn more about GLASSNET
Dr. Aline Mosnier
Aline Mosnier is the Scientific Director for the FABLE Consortium. She works with country teams to develop rigorous quantitative national pathways towards sustainable land use and food systems by 2050.
Prior to joining SDSN, Aline worked at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) where she contributed to the development of the global partial equilibrium model GLOBIOM. In particular, her work focused on international trade in agricultural products, indirect impacts of biofuel policies, climate change impacts on agriculture, and deforestation and forest degradation in the tropics. With teams from local research institutes, she has worked on the co-development of regional versions of GLOBIOM in the Congo Basin, Brazil and Indonesia. Finally, she has developed the FABLE calculator, a simplified country-Excel-based accounting tool on the food and land system.
Aline holds a PhD in Agricultural and Environment Economics from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences of Vienna and a master's in development economics from CERDI-Université d'Auvergne of Clermont-Ferrand.
Aline recently spoke at our GLASSNET Early Career Workshop: Navigating Transdisciplinary and Transnational Research in the Food-Land-Water-Energy Nexus in March 2024. You can watch her talk here.
Recent Developments and Challenges in Projecting the Impact of Crop Productivity Growth on Biodiversity Considering Market-Mediated Effects
Abhishek Chaudhary and Thomas Hertel
The effect of an increase in crop productivity (output per unit of inputs) on biodiversity is hitherto poorly understood. This is because increased productivity of a crop in particular regions leads to increased profit that can encourage expansion of its cultivated area causing land use change and ultimately biodiversity loss, a phenomenon also known as “Jevons paradox” or the “rebound effect”. Modeling such consequences in an interconnected and globalized world considering such rebound effects is challenging. Here, we discuss the use of computable general equilibrium (CGE) and other economic models in combination with ecological models to project consequences of crop productivity improvements for biodiversity globally. While these economic models have the advantage of taking into account market-mediated responses, resource constraints, endogenous price responses, and dynamic bilateral patterns of trade, there remain a number of important research and data gaps in these models which must be addressed to improve their performance in assessment of the link between local crop productivity changes and global biodiversity. To this end, we call for breaking the silos and building interdisciplinary networks across the globe to facilitate data sharing and knowledge exchange in order to improve global-to-local-to-global analysis of land, biodiversity, and ecosystem sustainability.
Check out all publications
New GLASSNET tools on MyGeoHub advance international, interdisciplinary research
Two new climate, land-use, and agricultural data tools developed by GLASSNET team members have recently been added to the online platform MyGeoHub (mygeohub.org), allowing researchers across domains to easily access the data they need to assess progress towards meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
GLASSNET, a five-year, NSF-funded project, is a global collaboration—a network of networks—aimed at understanding global drivers of local sustainability challenges, as well as the regional, national, and global consequences of local responses to these stresses. The intent of the GLASSNET network is to provide decision-makers from a wide array of areas with the data and models needed to properly assess actions that will affect the environment, the economy, and local communities. Although the different teams within the GLASSNET group hail from different fields, they all recognize that we live on a changing planet with limited water and land resources and that achieving global SDGs is of the utmost importance. They also recognize a major impediment to reaching these goals is the traditional isolation of scientific domains and the difficulty researchers have in communicating across different fields.
Check out all modeling tools and data
Online: April 1-26, 2024 In-Person: April 29 - May 3, 2024
The 2024 SIMPLE-G Short Course was held at Purdue University. Nineteen participants from the US, Europe, Australia, China, and Brazil completed four weeks of online learning, followed by one week of in-person training to learn the SIMPLE and SIMPLE-G models. SIMPLE-G is a multi-scale framework used for evaluation of sustainability policies in a global context while factoring in local heterogeneity in land and water resources, as well as natural ecosystem services.
The security of food, energy, and water is interwoven with human, economic, and environmental sustainability. This recognition suggests that decision-making for sustainability could benefit from a nexus approach that integrates resources across sectors and scales. This short course is designed to provide participants comprehensive training in the equilibrium modeling tools for economic as well as interdisciplinary analysis of sustainability issues across local, national, and global scales. The training modules are designed to provide an immersive experience that spans geospatial data, model code, and software structures to allow participants to examine real policy problems and synthesize quantitative results while enhancing their own intuition. Participants have four weeks to complete a self-guided online learning of the non-gridded SIMPLE model and prepare themselves for the transition to learning the gridded SIMPLE-G model. In the fifth week, participants are invited to come to Purdue University for a week-long in-person training that is composed of lectures, hand-on labs, and small group projects. This course includes recently developed model variants and a book about the theory, model development and applications of SIMPLE-G framework
Ensuring the long-term sustainability of our land and water resources, even as we seek to meet the world economy’s growing demands, requires informed management of the complex networks of policies, infrastructure, and technologies that connect the food and resource nexus. In addressing this challenge, a global perspective is required to determine the boundary conditions facing decision-makers as they seek to craft policies to ensure a sustainable economy and planet. The goals of the conference are: (i) to lead and to learn from other scholars, policymakers, and industry leaders engaged in the analysis of sustainability challenges at global, national, and local scales, and (ii) to identify current challenges in this space and (iii) contribute to the community-driven research agenda being developed under the auspices of the NSF-funded GLASSNET project can tackles these challenges using collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches that are responsive to stakeholder needs. A special issue of Environmental Research Letters has been commissioned to publish papers emerging from this conference.
The biannual meetings for GLASSNET take place in years 1, 3 and 5. The objective of this biennial meeting is to come to a consensus on GLASSNET’s prospective contributions over the course of this five-year project, and, more specifically, over the next two years (i.e., until the next biennial meeting, to be held in 2023). The first day of this meeting will focus on the themes growing out of our four summer workshops: (i) the science-policy interface, (ii) research challenges (in the context of specific use cases), (iii) data integration and interoperability, and (iv) cyberinfrastructure. In addition, we will be consider (v) how to evaluate the project’s impact on early career scholars and its success in promoting linkages across networks.
The cyberinfrastructure workshop took place on September 14, 2021. The goal of this workshop is to help flesh out the cyberinfrastructure section of our GLASSNET visioning paper being prepared in advance of our bi-annual meeting in October. This will build on the ideas and needs from the discussions of modeling and data integration working group during GLASSNET week and the subsequent workshops June-August. The key question to be discussed is what cyberinfrastructure is needed to enable data integration, exchange, and interoperability at the boundaries of the current GLASSNET networks, and develop human capital in and build the GLASSNET community.