Understanding the multiscale impacts of responses to water scarcity and land use change

Abstract:

Natural resource scarcity affects multiple systems at regional and global scales. Responses to regional scarcity ripple through connected markets and ultimately influence the global economy. At the same time, global responses to scarcity may cause disproportionate effects on regional economies. In complex systems, like the coupled natural-human system, such multiscale, multi-sector dynamics can be hard to anticipate. This study employs exploratory modeling and scenario discovery to examine the economic effects of resource scarcity at regional and global scales using a human-Earth system model. Using this model, we employ a metric of the overall economic impact of resource scarcity based on the concept of economic surplus. This metric has the benefit of a strong theoretical grounding in the economics literature. Here, we assess the economic impact of water scarcity as well as the impact of different land use and land cover incentives and pathways. From a large scenario ensemble, we use scenario discovery to ascertain the most influential factors that induce either highly positive or highly negative economic impact. The results of this study provide insight into the multiscale dynamics of the responses to natural resource scarcity and their economic implications.