The impacts of material supply availability on a transitioning electric power sector
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Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Wise, Marshall.
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Abstract Background Achieving a net zero greenhouse gas United States (US) economy is likely to require both deep sectoral mitigation and additional carbon dioxide removals to offset hard-to-abate emissions. Enhancing the terrestrial carbon sink, through practices such as the adoption of no-till and cover cropping agricultural management, could provide a portion of these required offsets. Changing domestic agricultural practices to optimize carbon content, however, might reduce or shift US agricultural commodity outputs and exports, with potential implications on respective global markets and land use patterns. Here, we use an integrated energy-economy-land-climate model to comprehensively assess the global land, trade, and emissions impacts of an adoption of domestic no-till farming and cover cropping practices based on carbon pricing. Results We find that the adoption of these practices varies depending on which aspects of terrestrial carbon are valued. Valuation of all terrestrial carbon resulted in afforestation at the expense of domestic agricultural production. In contrast, a policy valuing soil carbon in agricultural systems specifically indicates strong adoption of no-till and cover cropping for key crops. Conclusions We conclude that under targeted terrestrial carbon incentives, adoption of no-till and cover cropping practices in the US could increase the terrestrial carbon sink with limited effects on crop availability for food and fodder markets. Future work should consider integrated assessment modeling of non-CO 2 greenhouse gas impacts, above ground carbon storage changes, and capital and operating cost considerations.
Shared community scenarios of societal and environmental system changes have underpinned a broad range of research and assessment studies over the past several decades. These scenarios have largely aimed to address specific questions within broad issue areas like climate change or biodiversity and generally provided information on the drivers of change. The consequences of those drivers, such as impacts on society and policy responses, have tended to be left to the research community to investigate, using scenarios of drivers as inputs to their studies, producing projections of a disparate set of relevant output metrics. While this approach has had many benefits, it has fallen short of producing a robust, comparable literature describing outcomes across studies in common metrics. We argue that new scenarios are needed that extend current approaches to be organized around common outcome metrics for the well-being and resilience of society and ecosystems. We propose an approach that would focus on agreed upon outcomes for well-being and resilience as well as critical drivers of change, cut across issues and scales in multiple sectors, and draw on new systematic methods of scenario generation and discovery to highlight scenarios that are most critical in understanding societal risks and responding to them. Research derived from this outcome-based scenario development approach would facilitate improved assessment of risks of and responses to a range of stressors and the multi-sector interactions they generate.
The gcamfaostat R package is designed for the preparation, processing, and synthesis of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Statistics (FAOSTAT) agroeconomic data. The primary purpose is to facilitate FAOSTAT data use in global economic and multisector dynamic models while ensuring transparency, traceability, and reproducibility. Here, we provide an overview of the development of gcamfaostat (v1.0) and demonstrate its capabilities in generating and maintaining agroeconomic data required for the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM). Our initiative seeks to enhance the quality and accessibility of data for the global agroeconomic modeling community, with the aim of fostering more robust and harmonized outcomes in a collaborative, efficient, and open-source framework. One of the important features of the package is the possibility to construct the FAO Food Balance Sheets at the disaggregated commodity level (with over 500 commodities), which provides a comprehensive and detailed data input for a variety of analytical and modeling applications. The processed data and visualizations offered by gcamfaostat can also be valuable to a broader audience interested in gaining insights into the intricacies of global agriculture.
An R package to prepare, process, and synthesize FAOSTAT data for global agroeconomic and multisector dynamic modeling