Local, regional, and global adaptations to a compound pandemic-weather stress event

Abstract

Global food security can be threatened by short-term extreme events that negatively impact food production, food purchasing power, and agricultural economic activity. At the same time, environmental pollutants like greenhouse gases can be reduced due to the same short-term extreme stressors. Stress events include pandemics like COVID-19 and widespread droughts like those experienced in 2015. Here we consider the question: what if COVID-19 had co-occurred with a 2015-like drought year? Using a coupled biophysical-economic modeling framework, we evaluate how this compound stress would alter both agricultural sector greenhouse gas emissions and change the number of undernourished people worldwide. We further consider three interdependent adaptation options: local water use for crop production, regional shifts in cropland area, and global trade of agricultural products. We find that greenhouse gas emissions decline due to reduced economic activity in the agricultural sector, but this is paired with large increases in undernourished populations in developing nations. Local and regional adaptations that make use of natural resources enable global-scale reductions in impacted populations via increased global trade.

Envisioning a sustainable agricultural water future across spatial scales

“…Similarly, fertilizer limits on farmers could reduce yields, driving up food costs. In the short run, food prices will increase (9% reported by Haqiqi et al (2023)), motivating local production expansion, redistributing agricultural production along with the associated jobs and environmental costs to more water-favorable regions (Graham et al 2021), and increasing irrigation in traditionally rainfed regions of the eastern US (Jame and Bowling 2020). These externalities can also be passed to related regions through virtual water trade that allows water-stressed regions to import food, thereby avoiding agricultural water use locally.…”

“…If the virtual water comes from other waterstressed regions, imposing sustainable water limits in one location simply transports unsustainable water use to other regions, not unlike the 'leakage effect' widely reported in carbon policy studies (Babiker 2005, Jakob 2021, Grubb et al 2022. The indirect leakage effect is generally more moderate than the direct effect due to adaptations throughout the system such as substitution of food consumption, adjustment of agricultural technology, and changes in trade networks (Calzadilla et al 2010, Haqiqi et al 2023, Liu et al 2017. The nature of the effect, however, varies depending on factor endowment and comparative advantages of the trade partners, as well as the substitutability between domestic and foreign goods and environmental relevance (Boulay et al 2013, Hoekstra 2017, Hogeboom 2020.…”

“…Limiting irrigation transfers the pressure of ensuring food security to rainfed production, requiring larger cropped areas to account for lower and more variable yields in rainfed production which may then raise concerns about land use change and pollution. Haqiqi et al (2023) found that imposing a sustainable groundwater policy in the US led to US irrigated acreage decreasing by 11.6 million hectares, but global cropland increasing by 29.5 million hectares, effectively exporting the environmental costs of production. Imposing nitrate conservation measures in the Mississippi River basin shifts production outside of the basin (Liu et al 2022a).…”

Transdisciplinary approaches to graduate student training for food–energy–water challenges

“…The stresses on natural resources necessary to meet current food production and consumption patterns threaten human and planetary health (Barrera & Miljkovic, 2022;Campbell et al, 2017;López Barrera & Hertel, 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine have created even greater severity and complexity to disruptions in the food production and trade (Barrera & Miljkovic, 2022;Diffenbaugh et al, 2020;Haqiqi et al, 2021), leading to calls for holistic nexus approaches to comprehend and address the complex tradeoffs, synergies, and cascading effects of these systems (Chaplin-Kramer et al, 2022;Hertel et al, 2021;Newell et al, 2019;Valin et al, 2021).…”

Focus on global–local–global analysis of sustainability

“…Instead of focusing on long run, global drivers such as population growth and climate change, Haqiqi et al (2023b) focus on global changes that are of shorter duration and generate immediate stress on local social and ecological systems. They focus on the confluence of two global shocks, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the presence of widespread drought, and address how these shocks interact.…”