Identifying Sustainability Solutions through Global-Local-Global Analysis of a Coupled Water-Agriculture-Bioenergy System

Despite significant investments made by the integrated assessment communities at both global and regional scales, a critical research gap remains in the ability to assess sustainability solutions that have both cross-system and cross-scale components needed to achieve a complete analysis of tradeoffs associated with alternative policy and management interventions. The interdisciplinary project will address this knowledge gap by developing and applying a path-breaking integrative framework for analysis of FEWS solutions that highlights synergies and tradeoffs resulting from different policy levers to allow the development of more comprehensive sustainability solutions. This open-source, reproducible, and accessible framework will strategically build on a portfolio of internationally vetted tools the team has authored as global models of hydrology and water quality, food, bioenergy and U.S. agro-ecology.  Researchers will systematically explore solutions beginning with analysis of individual interventions and progressing to multiple interventions that reveal how policy levers interact across systems and scales for a Global to Local to Global community of practice.