Jan 2024
Abstract
Humanity has already reached or even exceeded the Earth’s carrying capacity. Growing needs for food, energy and water will only exacerbate existing challenges over the next decades. Consequently, the acceptance of “business as usual” is eroding and we are being challenged to adopt new, more integrated, and more inclusive development pathways that avoid dangerous interference with the local economy and environment in the context of global planetary boundaries. This challenge is embodied in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which endeavor to set a global agenda for moving towards more sustainable development strategies. To improve and sustain human welfare, it is critical that access to modern, reliable, and affordable water, energy, and food is expanded and maintained. Systems science is an interdisciplinary approach that tries to unravel the complexity of systems in nature, society and economy that it is hard to explain by a specific scientific discipline. Some of the systems science methodologies include interdisciplinary process and systems dynamics modeling, agent-based modeling (ABM), microsimulation, and AI/Big Data techniques. Systems science thinking can help to understand the factors influencing the distribution and determinants of water-food-energy nexus in socio-economic system, by providing information on the broad picture on how individual sectors and other components of underlying drivers of water supply, food-energy production, technology, investment and trade agreement are interconnected in society and economy. Therefore, system science thinking can help to find how interventions may generate potential synergies and trade-off in outcomes (e.g., food production-water supply-ecosystem/biodiversity, food production-energy price-trade agreement) given the system multilevel factors present in country/regional/global socio-economic system. In this seminar, a few examples are introduced that build up towards my future ambition: 1) Development of integrated nexus modeling framework for water, food and energy and strategies for achieving the needed transformational outcomes, 2) A multi-scalar approach that aims to combine global and regional modeling tools with local stakeholder knowledge in order to identify robust solutions to water, food, energy, and ecosystem security, 3) Construction of multi-agent models to capture the connections and feedbacks in food and water system under scenarios of future changes in climate, demographics, land use, and economic expansion so that policy makers can evaluate viable development paths adapted to local needs. These efforts provide potential insights into how policies, technological solutions and investments can improve the sustainability of food, water, and energy transformation while avoiding unintended side effects and minimizing trade-offs among sectors.
Bio
Prof. Dr. Yoshihide Wada is (Full) Professor of Plant Science and Environmental Science and Engineering at Division of Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering with a membership in the Center for Desert Agriculture and the Climate and Livability Initiative at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Before joining KAUST, he was Director of IIASA’s Biodiversity and Natural Resources (BNR) Program. He has a joint appointment as a Chair Professor of Global Water and Food Security at the Department of Physical Geography, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Dr. Wada obtained his PhD degree with distinction (Cum Laude) at Utrecht University. His completed PhD projects include estimating global water use and water availability by using a global hydrological and water resources model. His work also includes estimating and projecting global water scarcity, and assessing the sustainability of global groundwater resources. Many of his work has appeared in Science, Nature, Nature Geoscience, Nature Climate Change, Nature Sustainability and PNAS. At IIASA, he led strategic science development at IIASA’s BNR program (>100 staffs) and has acquired and managed various research projects accumulating a total budget of 10 million EUR for last several years. He also ledsvarious development oriented projects with development banks (World Bank, Inter-American Bank, Asian Development Bank, Global Environmental Facility, Austrian Development Agency) in order to translate robust scientific knowledge to local and regional policy development (e.g., East Africa Water Development Plan). He has led and participated in a number of international projects including European GLOWASIS (Global Water Scarcity Information Service) Project, ISI-MIP (Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project), LandMIP (Land Modelling Intercomparison Project), World Resources Institute (WRI) Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, and EartH2Observe (Global Earth Observation for Integrated Water Resource Assessment). He has also involved in in the Fifth and Sixth Assessment Report (AR5/6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Working Group I/II). He is also a lead author of the UNEP GEO-6 (Global Environmental Outlook) for Freshwater and a major contributor to G20 Action Plan on Water (G20 in Saudi Arabia). He was elected as Governors of World Water Council-World Water Forum (WWC-WWF; 2019-2022). He is the recipient of the Horton (Hydrology) Research Grant by the American Geophysical Union (AGU; 2012), European Geoscience Union (EGU) Arne Richter Award for Outstanding Early Career Scientists (2018), American Geophysical Union (AGU) Hydrologic Science Early Career Award (2018) as well as American Geophysical Union (AGU) James B. Macelwane Medal (2020). He has been elected as a fellow of American Geophysical Union (AGU; 2020). He has also been awarded the prestigious Hydrological Award from the Dutch Hydrological Society (NHV; 2017), the NICE STEP (NISTEP) Award from Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT) and National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (2017), and the Young Scientist Prize from the MEXT (2018). Dr. Wada has been invited to more than 300 conferences worldwide. He is an (associate) editor of Water Resources Research (AGU), One Earth (Cell Press) and Hydrological Research Letters. Dr. Wada has (co)authored about 300 publications, 220 of which appeared in international peer-reviewed journals. The citation of these peer-reviewed papers exceeds 7000 each year (h-index: 87 in Scopus and 97 in Google Scholar). He has been selected as a highly cited researcher (top 1%) by Web of Science/Scopus since 2018 and the Reuters Hot List of the World’s Top 1000 Climate Scientists (ranked 301). He has worldwide collaborations (>100 external partners) in multidisciplinary topics in water, food, energy, biodiversity, earth observation, and economics.