Thomas Hertel

This research investigates the socioeconomic and labor market consequences of heat stress, focusing on regional and sectoral disparities, using Brazil as a case study. We adopt a novel approach by integrating regional modeling into the global context, thereby capturing the intricate effects of heat stress at both regional and local levels. Our analysis reveals a troubling trend of exacerbated regional and socioeconomic inequalities due to climate impacts.

A growing body of research suggests that climate change will have an overall negative effect on the challenges of nonpoint source pollution control. Much of this literature has focused on linking projections of changing climate to process-based hydrological and biophysical models, and some simultaneously considered stylized changes in management practices. The role of markets and economic choices, as well as its interaction with the physical world has largely been left out of the assessment. In this paper, we demonstrate how economic decisions can be connected with biophysical properties via the medium of transfer functions. Applying this integrated modeling framework to a hypothetical N loss tax experiment, we find that employing market-mediated instruments to reduce nonpoint source pollution will become more costly due to the still profitable intensification and the increasing opportunity cost of …

This manuscript briefly describes methods used to examine the potential implications of the 30x30 biodiversity conservation targets for local and global food systems. These targets call for protecting 30% of the Earth's land and ocean resources by 2030. There are concerns about the likely impact of implementing these targets on food prices, food security, and spillover to other locations. We developed a gridded economic model to quantify the complex interactions between land-use changes driven by 30x30 and global food security. Our analysis focuses on the critical uncertainties arising from different implementations of land supply elasticities and land use specification, a key factor influencing land-use change dynamics in future scenarios. We examine these variations across global, regional, and local (grid cell) scales. Preliminary findings suggest land supply elasticities significantly influence the magnitude and …

In this document, we aim to compile a revised set of value-added cost shares that underly the GTAP database construction. Primary factor shares (land, labor, and capital) in agricultural value added for each of the 65 GTAP region are based on a core set of estimated shares obtained from the literature. But these cost shares are volatile and input-output tables frequently do not provide a three-way split of value-added (typically, only returns to labor are reported). As a result, it is necessary to revise these shares underlying the GTAP database using more recent estimates produced in the literature

The relationship between global trade drivers and local agricultural and environmental responses has been an increasingly important research question. When international trade policy shocks the supply-demand equilibrium for a certain country, such impacts will not be uniform but show spatial heterogeneity at local level, in particular for agricultural production, land use and the corresponding environmental implications. In this study, we developed an innovative general-equilibrium economic model, GTAP-SIMPLEG, to capture the relationship between global drivers and local responses. This model extends the current GTAP framework by embedding a gridded multiple-crop (eight GTAP crop categories) supply and multiple-land use (cropland, pasture and forest) system in the focused region (here is Brazil). Taking the soybean trade between the US, Brazil and China as an example, we apply GTAP-SIMPLEG to …

This chapter describes how we obtained the initial estimates for the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) behavioral parameters file. These include the source substitution or Armington elasticities, the factor substitution elasticities, the factor transformation elasticities, the investment parameters, and the consumer demand elasticities. Table 16.1 summarizes for these parameters: the associated notation, the set over which they are indexed, and their description. In this chapter we explain the

High transportation costs have been a barrier to the expansion of agriculture in the interior of Brazil. To reduce transportation costs, Brazil launched the National Logistics Plan, aiming to expand its railway network by up to 91 % by 2035. Such a large-scale infrastructure investment raises concerns about its economic and environmental consequences. By combining geospatial estimation of transportation cost with a grid-resolving, multi-scale economic model that bridges fine-scale crop production with its trade and demand from national and global perspectives, we explore impacts of transportation infrastructure expansion on agricultural production, land use changes, and carbon emissions both locally and nationally in Brazil. We find that globally, the impacts on output and land use changes are small. However, within Brazil, the plan's primary impacts are impressive. PNL2035 results in the reduction of …

The effect of an increase in crop productivity (output per unit of inputs) on biodiversity is hitherto poorly understood. This is because increased productivity of a crop in particular regions leads to increased profit that can encourage expansion of its cultivated area causing land use change and ultimately biodiversity loss, a phenomenon also known as “Jevons paradox” or the “rebound effect”. Modeling such consequences in an interconnected and globalized world considering such rebound effects is challenging. Here, we discuss the use of computable general equilibrium (CGE) and other economic models in combination with ecological models to project consequences of crop productivity improvements for biodiversity globally. While these economic models have the advantage of taking into account market-mediated responses, resource constraints, endogenous price responses, and dynamic bilateral patterns of …