Integrated assessment of global agricultural land and water resources in a changing world
type: CreativeWork
description: Climate-Water-Food (CWF) system involves numerous interactions and is gaining much attention since last decade. Climate change has generated significant influences on natural resources and agriculture, and the impacts are likely to amplify in the future. Land and water resources are two main constraining factors for agriculture, and the pressure on the natural resources will continue rising due to population growth and economic development. Therefore, it is of great importance to improve the understanding of the CWF system and adopt wise management practices to adapt with the global changes in both the environment and the human society. This dissertation develops an integrated framework for characterizing interactions within the complex CWF system. The aim of this framework is to optimize agricultural land and water resources at the global scale. To achieve that, a Global Optimization Model of Agricultural Land and Water resources (GOALW) is developed and implemented. GOALW is a partial equilibrium model with a global objective such as global welfare maximization and global security maximization. It is composed of socio-economic and agro-hydrologic components. The model is able to simulate the interactions among price, demand, crop area, productivity, and irrigation water use, and provide valuable insights such as marginal value of water and land. The marginal value (MV) of agricultural water availability refers to how much the global social welfare increases when local agricultural water availability increases by one unit. Western U.S., north Europe, west Europe and east coast of Australia have relatively high MV, while Amazon area, inland of Africa, Mideast, western area of Asia have lower MV. Nevertheless, marginal cost are high in high plains of U.S., southern China and Ganges area of India, which may offset their advantages in MV. Crop yield and per capita income could explain more than 40% of MV value, and water scarcity index (ratio of the annual irrigation r…
abstract: Climate-Water-Food (CWF) system involves numerous interactions and is gaining much attention since last decade. Climate change has generated significant influences on natural resources and agriculture, and the impacts are likely to amplify in the future. Land and water resources are two main constraining factors for agriculture, and the pressure on the natural resources will continue rising due to population growth and economic development. Therefore, it is of great importance to improve the understanding of the CWF system and adopt wise management practices to adapt with the global changes in both the environment and the human society. This dissertation develops an integrated framework for characterizing interactions within the complex CWF system. The aim of this framework is to optimize agricultural land and water resources at the global scale. To achieve that, a Global Optimization Model of Agricultural Land and Water resources (GOALW) is developed and implemented. GOALW is a partial equilibrium model with a global objective such as global welfare maximization and global security maximization. It is composed of socio-economic and agro-hydrologic components. The model is able to simulate the interactions among price, demand, crop area, productivity, and irrigation water use, and provide valuable insights such as marginal value of water and land. The marginal value (MV) of agricultural water availability refers to how much the global social welfare increases when local agricultural water availability increases by one unit. Western U.S., north Europe, west Europe and east coast of Australia have relatively high MV, while Amazon area, inland of Africa, Mideast, western area of Asia have lower MV. Nevertheless, marginal cost are high in high plains of U.S., southern China and Ganges area of India, which may offset their advantages in MV. Crop yield and per capita income could explain more than 40% of MV value, and water scarcity index (ratio of the annual irrigation r…
author: Zhang, Xiao
language: en
keywords: Integrated assessment, water resources
date published: 2015-01-21T19:48:14Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:26:07Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/72792