Iowa NSF EPSCoR Energy Policy Seminar Series

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Date/Time:Monday, 09 Mar 2015 from 12:00 pm to 1:20 pm
Location:1306 Elings Hall
Cost:Free
URL: http://iowaepscor.org/energypolicyseminars
Contact:
Phone:515-294-6998
Channel:Research
Categories:Lectures Live Green
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"Land-use changes through 2050: highlights from a global agro-economic model comparison," Dominique van der Mensbrugghe, Purdue University.

Abstract
The growing concerns with the impacts of climate change, combined with the 2007/08 price crisis and its aftermath has highlighted the importance of potential land and water constraints and the ability of the planet to feed a growing population--that could reach up to 10 billion persons under some scenarios. One of the reactions to these concerns has been a renewed interest in quantitative analysis of future scenarios for world agriculture and food security with a focus on natural resource constraints. It is clear from recent studies that there is a wide range of potential outcomes in terms of price evolution, resource availability, and trade--many of which are linked to different assumptions regarding changes in technology, preferences and future resource availability. However, the underlying causes of this range of outcomes is not fully understood by the analysts, nor more importantly, by policy makers that are looking for policy guidance to avoid potentially disastrous outcomes. A group of 10 prominent teams of global economic models of agriculture was assembled in the fall of 2011 under the aegis of the relatively new network known as the Agricultural Modeling Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP). The teams undertook a range of identical simulations, harmonizing on baseline assumptions for population, GDP and exogenous yield growth, to elucidate the key factors that underlie differences in model results. This seminar will describe the key components of the models, the harmonization assumptions, land-use specification in the models and highlight the range of outcomes focusing in particular on land-use.

Bio
Dominique van der Mensbrugghe is Research Professor and Director of the Center for Global Trade Analysis (GTAP) at Purdue University. The focus of his work during his career has been on long-term structural change of the global economy and the analysis of global economic policy issues--including agricultural policies, regional and multilateral trade agreements, demographics and international migration, the Millennium Development Goals, and climate change. His work has appeared frequently in various economic journals and the agencies' flagship reports and he is one of the world's experts on global computable general equilibrium modeling.