Agricultural economy

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Applications
Eururalis
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
UNEPs Global Environmental Outlooks
Internal modules
Land use allocation module
External modules
EFIGTM
IMPACT
MAGNET
References
Stehfest, 2013

Introduction

Expansion of agriculture is one of the most important and visible alternations of the natural environment, leading to greenhouse gas emissions, loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, and nutrient imbalances. It is driven by the production of food, feed for livestock, fibers and other products, bioenergy and timber, resulting from domestic demand and trade in these products. In IMAGE, demand and trade are based on external projections of demographic and economic development, technological change, policy scenarios, and resource availability. Changes in income and population lead to a changing demand for agricultural commodities. This induces a change in the supply, which also depends on the resource availability and the efficiency of natural resource use. This efficiency can change as a result of technological change and substitution between production factors.

Agricultural economy

Agricultural production is distributed across regions via trade, depending on their historic trade balances and their competitiveness. In IMAGE, two different agro-economic models, IMPACT and MAGNET (formerly LEITAP) can be applied via a soft model linkage linkage scheme {!Add thumbnail or picture of scheme ?} to model the future development of the agricultural economy. The model selection depends on the specific questions to be addressed. While IMPACT has been used for developing alternative baselines in international assessments like Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and UNEPs Global Environmental Outlooks , the MAGNET model has been applied more often to study specific policy options at the global and regional scale, and for European assessments such as Eururalis. The coupling between these two models and IMAGE is similar (see scheme above), and a detailed comparison between the two models is available elsewhere Reference Stehfest, 2013 #778. Here, the focus is on MAGNET Flow diagram magnet {!Add thumbnail or picture of diagram?} .

Agricultural forestry

The demand for forest products can be derived in IMAGE from several sources. In the most simple case via a simple relation with GDP, or, preferably, prescribed from specific forest demand models like EFIGTM (Ref.). In the future, full competition of forestry with other land uses can be accounted for by using the forestry module of MAGNET (not available yet). Other land use changes, like the expansion of infrastructure, which do not require inter-regional connections, are described in the land use allocation module {!Chapter/Module consistency}.

Development Notes Introduction

References to:

  • External models (used but not developed within the IMAGE framework)
  • Projects
  • Internal modules
  • References

Acronyms

  • GDP,...

More about Agricultural economy

You can find more information on the following pages: