ID31: Integrated socioecological and ecohydrological modelling

Abstract ID 902 | Date: 2022-09-12 16:13 – 16:26 | Type: Oral Presentation | Place: SOWI – Seminar room SR2 |

Moreno-Llorca, Ricardo (1); Martínez-López, Javier (1); Ros-Candeira, Andrea (1); Merino-Ceballos, Manuel (1); Guerrero-Alonso, Pablo (4); Millares, Agustín (2); Alcaraz-Segura, Domingo (3); Mellado-García, Ana (4); Zamora, Regino (1,5)

Sierra Nevada (Spain) is a Mediterranean mountain massif where the interaction between ecosystems, abiotic factors and population over hundreds and thousands of years has configured the land use and the resulting landscape. The protection of this area, initially as a natural park and later as a national park, is a further factor conditioning these relationships. In this way, a socio-ecological system integrated by ecological, social, biophysical, and environmental management variables, determines current and future land use changes and landscapes. A Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) model was developed to assess land-use management in Protected Areas (PAs). The BBN was designed to develop future land-use scenarios for the Sierra Nevada under different socioecological and management conditions. The process to develop the BBN began with a literature review of several models of land use change with a special emphasis on the actors who make the decision to change land use. Once a preliminary set of drivers of land use change was defined, we used an iterative process of consultation with experts and workshops with stakeholders to build the model structure. Interviews were initially carried out with expert researchers on land use change and agricultural activity, where the drivers relevant for the Sierra Nevada were discussed. Afterwards, several workshops were carried out with experts and stakeholders, one in each differentiated zone of Sierra Nevada: north-west, south, and east to validate the nodes of the network, the variables categories, the causal relationships between variables and the parametrization of the BBN. The BBN is useful for assessing future land use scenarios in a spatial way with a temporal dynamic approach, based on different climate/water, socioeconomical, ecological and management conditions. The BBN model includes environmental and agricultural management variables (e.g. conservation policies, agricultural payments), as well as socio-economic (e.g. old population, training of farmers, part time business), ecological (e.g. vegetations and land uses), and biophysical variables (e.g. slope, altitude) that are used to feed a distributed eco-hydrological model (WiMMed), integrated with the Bayesian model, to predict water flow and runoff, as well as several soil erosion processes in Sierra Nevada catchments.   This combination of models allows managers to assess how changes in any of the BBN model’s input conditions, individually or in combination, may determine future land use changes and related ecosystem services.

This work is part of Smart EcoMountains, the Thematic Center on Mountain Ecosystems of LifeWatch-ERIC.

Abstract ID 110 | Date: 2022-09-12 16:26 – 16:39 | Type: Oral Presentation | Place: SOWI – Seminar room SR2 |

Nuppenau, Ernst-August

There is an ongoing debate on how to relink manual labour to food production and reproduction of biological resources; i.e. using bio-physical resources instead of using fossil fuel inputs in farming and creating negative externalities. Especially a focus is on humans who work for nature sustaining ecosystem services in less fertile areas such as mountains. Currently food production is part of profit led agri­business aiming at cost minimization and selling food at market prices without recognizing sufficiently labouring for nature. In peasant economies, objectives were broader, including reproduction of humans and nature. We use this notification for a revision of objectives and delineate a behaviour analysis based on effort minimization and bio-physical goals, such as nutrition as well as sustaining population. The hypo­thesis is: reproduction and production (as goals) are to be con­nected. Technically the paper ex­plores how one can apply programming techniques to derive beha­vioural equations based on energy spen­ding and alternatively we get shadow prices as incenti­ves for reproduction. The paper shows that be­havioural equations can be adjusted in system analysis including metabolism and the emphasis is on optimal labouring for food and sustainability.

A question addressed is: what are al­ter­natives to pure human utility maximization? As there is a long discussion on utility maximi­zation vs. pro­fit ma­xi­mi­za­tion in peasant economies, pure profit maximization is reckoned a special case. We go beyond, refer to reproduction and offer a rationale, which is embedded in ecosystem services. Working for reproduction is important for food systems, which include living organisms and have to sustain biological resource balancing bio-physical aspects.

Against that background it is the aim of this paper to explore joint aspects of production, reproduction and behaviour in a formalized model on peasantry. This model shall be applied to a typical mountain farming environment with smallholders. A new mode of objective function for­mu­lation is offered and we pro­vide a conceptual outlay for more sustainable farming. Furthermore we look at policy implications and will show how labour recognition can be a matter of payment for sustaining farming, i.e. in areas of high biodiversity.

The paper is ordered in five parts. (i) We talk about background and concept. (ii) A mo­del­­ling fra­me­work is introduced. (iii) Production is modified along reproduction. (iv) Empiri­cal grounding is discussed and (v) scopes for uses are deliberated. It is a conceptual paper on biologi­cal aspects of labour and shows a new way for peasant farming system.

Abstract ID 284 | Date: 2022-09-12 16:39 – 16:52 | Type: Oral Presentation | Place: SOWI – Seminar room SR2 |

Dhaubanjar, Sanita (1,2); Lutz, Arthur (2); Gernaat, David (3); Nepal, Santosh (1); Pradhananga, Saurav (1); Khanal, Sonu (4); Bhakta Shrestha, Arun (1); Immerzeel, Walter (2)

Hydropower is a cost effective option for energy generation in the remote mountains of the upper Indus. Hence, sustainable hydropower development is essential to sustainable mountain development in this region. Hydropower is intricately linked to the sustainable development goals (SDGs) related to the water-energy-food-environment nexus. Hydropower is also connected to other SDGs on conservation of biodiversity, disaster risk reduction and investments in resilient infrastructures. Considering these interlinkages, we develop a modelling framework to demonstrate how hydropower potential is linked to socio-political choices regarding scale of hydropower development, perception of risks of natural hazards and priorities within the water-energy-food-environment nexus. Our framework takes a systems approach to quantify the gap between theoretical and sustainable hydropower potential by successively considering natural, technical, financial, anthropogenic, environmental, and natural hazard risk constraints on hydropower potential at individual sites as well as at the basin scale. We model three energy development scenarios representing different scales of hydropower development of interest to the government, the private sector or the local communities. Focusing on large scale development reveals technical potential at 16% and sustainable potential at only 3% of the basin theoretical potential of about 1200 Terawatt-hours per year. A more inclusive scenario, combining small community-led and large privately or publicly funded hydropower development, reveals technical potential at 25% and sustainable potential at 8% of the theoretical potential. Further relaxing natural hazard risk criteria can increase the sustainable potential to 13% of the theoretical. As such, our optimization framework shows that under the current hydro-climatology, sustainable potential is only a small portion of the theoretical potential. Other anthropogenic and environmental water usage represent the strongest constraints with nearly a third of the technical potential being reduced when adding these to evaluate sustainable potential in the upper Indus. The Indus main, Swat and Kabul sub-basins have a larger proportion of cheaper and sustainable hydropower plants compared to other sub-basins where development plans visualized by riparian governments already tap into high potential river segments. Our framework expands traditional technical-economical considerations in hydropower planning to include socio-ecological constraints and impact of policy choices in the first order identification of sustainable hydropower plants. This approach can provide a solid basis to develop science-based hydropower development pathways that maximize the synergies between water, food, energy and the environment.

Abstract ID 524 | Date: 2022-09-12 16:52 – 17:05 | Type: Oral Presentation | Place: SOWI – Seminar room SR2 |

Gaube, Veronika (1); Haberl, Helmut (1); Mehdi-Schulz, Bano (1); Tappeiner, Ulrike (2)

Nexus approaches help establishing linkages between phenomena requiring contributions from several, so far distant, scientific fields in order to develop a deeper understanding of patterns and trajectories. Sustainability of complex society-nature interactions is an important case in point, and several resource nexus phenomena are high on the agenda, e.g. the food – water – energy nexus. Recently, the stock-flow-service (SFS) nexus has been proposed to tackle the interrelations between social metabolism (SEM) and the provision of services that are of key importance for societal wellbeing and decent living. Socio-metabolic research analyzes the flows of biophysical resources such as materials and energy as well as the quantities and patterns of material stocks such as buildings, infrastructures and machinery. Build-up and use of material stocks requires large amounts of resources and strongly affects a society’s ability to deliver services that are crucial for their wellbeing, e.g. shelter, mobility, health care, water and food supply, education and many more. The SFS nexus has gained substantial interest as a heuristic means to analyze resource requirements for decent living standards, as well as important aspects of SEM in conjunction with specific services, e.g. those associated with mobility or lighting. Recently, the complimentary concept of a stock-flow-practice (SFP) nexus has been proposed. Practices are routine activities embedded in societies’ material and institutional structures. Most resource-intensive consumption occurs as part of practices, e.g. those related with feeding oneself, using living space or being mobile. As shown in recent conceptual work, the practice approach offers attractive opportunities to link social-science centered approaches with SEM. This proposed presentation will review these recent conceptual advances and take things further by showing how SFS and SFP nexus phenomena can be tackled through integrated socioecological models that combine agent-based with ecohydrological models. Agent-based models help bridging the gap between formal but restrictive models and rich but imprecise qualitative descriptions. Moreover, agent-based models are particularly well suited for incorporating detailed, multi-layered empirical data about human behaviour and the social and physical environment, and can thus comprehensively represent those aspects of human decision-making that are reflected in practices. Drawing on two decades of local and regional-scale research where this methodological approach has been applied we will demonstrate how these methods can be employed to model SFS and SFP-related ecohydrological phenomena at local and regional scales.