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. Erwin Corong
Erwin is a principal research economist at the Center for Global Trade Analysis, Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University. He manages the construction programs for a number of GTAP databases including standard GTAP, MRIO (Multi-Region Input Output), labor, domestic margins, and contributes to the construction of the land use and land cover data. Since joining GTAP in 2015, Erwin refreshed the standard GTAP model code and converted other GTAP suite of (GTAP-E, Power, AEZ, GMig) models to the current version 7 structure. During the last five years, he developed the GTAP-MRIO, GTAP-DM (Domestic Margins), GTAP-DS (Domestic Support) and the GTAP-RD (recursive dynamic) suite of economic models. He also co-developed models such as GTAP-HS (Harmonized System), standard GTAP-RD and the World Trade Organization’ Global Trade Model. Erwin is currently working on the GTAP Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) for climate policy analyses. His research focuses on agricultural domestic support, international trade, non-tariff measures, domestic trade and transport margins, dynamic baselines and validation, economy-energy-environment interaction, poverty, inequality, and linking GTAP-RD with the InVEST model to analyze sustainable development issues.
Investing in nature can improve equity and economic returns
Sustainable development requires jointly achieving economic development to raise standards of living and environmental sustainability to secure these gains for the long run. Here, we develop a local-to-global, and global-to-local, earth-economy model that integrates the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP)-computable general equilibrium model of the economy with the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model of fine-scale, spatially explicit ecosystem services. The integrated model, GTAP–InVEST, jointly determines land use, environmental conditions, ecosystem services, market prices, supply and demand across economic sectors, trade across regions, and aggregate performance metrics like GDP. We use the integrated model to analyze the contribution of investing in nature for economic prosperity, accounting for the impact of four important ecosystem services (pollination, timber provision, marine fisheries, and carbon sequestration). We show that investments in nature result in large improvements relative to a business-as-usual path, accruing annual gains of $100 to $350 billion (2014 USD) with the largest percentage gains in the lowest-income countries. Our estimates include only a small subset of ecosystem services and could be far higher with inclusion of more ecosystem services, incorporation of ecological tipping points, and reduction in substitutability that limits economic adjustments to declines in natural capital. Our analysis highlights the need for improved environmental–economic modeling and the vital importance of integrating environmental information firmly into economic analysis and policy. The benefits of doing so are potentially very large, with the greatest percentage benefits accruing to inhabitants of the poorest countries.
Read the paper here.
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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.