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.
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Dr. Justin Andrew Johnson, Assistant Professor of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota
Justin received his Ph.D. in 2014 from Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota and his B.A. in economics from St. Olaf College. Justin works closely with the Natural Capital Project at The Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota and Stanford University. Justin’s research focuses on how the economy affects the environment, and vice versa, on global to local scales. Currently, Justin leads a project that links the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) out of Purdue University with the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model from the Natural Capital Project, aiming to build strong quantitative evidence on how changes in ecosystem services affect economic performance at the macroeconomic level and how global policies can be designed to sustainably manage our natural capital. In his spare time, Justin is an avid board game designer.
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The novel tool, SIMPLE-G, a Simplified International Model of agricultural Prices, Land use, and the Environment- Gridded version, is used for evaluating sustainability policies in a global context while factoring in local heterogeneity in land and water resources and natural ecosystem services. This multi-scale model can provide boundary conditions for local decision makers, as well as capturing feedback from local policies to national and global scales. Two applications of the model are used to illustrate its value in environmental analysis. The first model, quantifies the local stresses on land and water resources due to global changes in population, income, and productivity. The second model quantifies the global impacts of local policy responses and adaptations to war scarcity.
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AgMIP GlobalEcon Data Submission and Explorer Tools
The AgMIP Global Economics Team is an international network of researchers whose main objective is to undertake multi-model comparisons of critical issues affecting global agriculture—such as rising temperatures. The models vary greatly in their design, though all are able to produce a common set of indicators such as agricultural production, trade and prices. One challenge has been to pool the results using a standardized interface and to provide access to the ensemble of model results. Thus, new web-based tools have been developed, in collaboration with Purdue’s Research Computing. These tools have several useful features: a) a standardized interface for uploading model submissions with built-in diagnostic checking; b) ability to query the resulting database of merged results with download capability; and c) visualization of select results. The tools could potentially be used for similar multi-model exercises.
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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 biannual 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 biannual 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.