Browsing by Subject "CGE Modell"

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    Economy-wide policy modeling of the food-energy-water nexus : identifying synergies and tradeoffs on food, energy, and water security in Malawi
    (2017) Schünemann, Franziska; Zeller, Manfred
    Food, energy, and water are essential goods for human survival. The three goods are intrinsically connected through economic consumption and production linkages as well as ecological processes. All three are dependent on limited resources which are threatened by global drivers in the form of economic growth, population growth, and climate change that are particularly affecting developing countries. Therefore, a nexus perspective that simultaneously encompasses food, energy, and water has become crucial to avoid resource inefficiencies and to ensure the provision of the three goods for the most vulnerable people. This dissertation contributes to the research on the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus approach through first developing integrated modeling frameworks that capture the linkages between food, energy, and water, in order to secondly identify those policy measures that maximize the synergies for food, energy, and water security and minimize the tradeoffs. To this end, three studies analyze four policies – biofuels production, irrigation expansion, improved cookstoves and agroforestry – that directly affect food, energy, and water security and provide a large scope for realizing synergies. The empirical findings of this dissertation show that policy measures indeed produce some tradeoffs between FEW security, but that – if policies are designed correctly – the tradeoffs can be minimized while simultaneously maximizing the synergies. These findings are an essential contribution to the literature through proving that even in a world with enormous pressures on limited resources, prudent policy making can provide FEW security for all people. Finally, the results demonstrate that the development of integrated modeling frameworks is vital for quantitative analyses of policies that simultaneously affect the economic, social, and environmental spheres to identify the synergies and tradeoffs. This dissertation makes an important methodological contribution to integrated environmental-economic modeling of developing countries and may serve as a starting point for future research on linking the economy and the environment in models.