Jampel Dell'Angelo

Reserves and trade jointly determine exposure to food supply shocks

While a growing proportion of global food consumption is obtained through international trade, there is an ongoing debate on whether this increased reliance on trade benefits or hinders food security, and specifically, the ability of global food systems to absorb shocks due to local or regional losses of production. This paper introduces a model that simulates the short-term response to a food supply shock originating in a single country, which is partly absorbed through decreases in domestic reserves and consumption, and partly transmitted through the adjustment of trade flows. By applying the model to publicly-available data for the cereals commodity group over a 17 year period, we find that differential outcomes of supply shocks simulated through this time period are driven not only by the intensification of trade, but as importantly by changes in the distribution of reserves. Our analysis also identifies countries where trade dependency may accentuate the risk of food shortages from foreign production shocks; such risk could be reduced by increasing domestic reserves or importing food from a diversity of suppliers that possess their own reserves. This simulation-based model provides a framework to study the short-term, nonlinear and out-of-equilibrium response of trade networks to supply shocks, and could be applied to specific scenarios of environmental or economic perturbations.

The Global Food‐Energy‐Water Nexus

Water availability is a major factor constraining humanitys ability to meet the future food and energy needs of a growing and increasingly affluent human population. Water plays an important role ...

Household-level heterogeneity of water resources within common-pool resource systems

Prior work has demonstrated the ability of common property systems to sustain institutional arrangements governing natural resources over long periods of time. Much of this work has focused on irrigation systems where upstream users agree to management arrangements that distribute water resources across both upstream and downstream users. A series of design principles have been identified that tend to lead to long-term sustained water management in these types of irrigation systems. However, this prior work has focused on the aggregate outcomes of the water system, and there has been little work evaluating the heterogeneity of water delivery within irrigation systems in developing countries. Heterogeneity of water resources within these systems has implications for livelihood outcomes because it can be indicative of a social, technological, and/or biophysical element facilitating or detracting from water delivery. We present a multilevel analysis of households nested within 25 smallholder irrigation systems in Kenya. Specifically, we examine household-level water outcomes (i.e., average flow rate and reliability of water provisioning) and the community-level and household-level drivers that affect household water outcomes. These drivers include physical infrastructure, institutional infrastructure, and biophysical variables. Much of the common-pool resource literature addresses the rule clusters responsible for natural resource outcomes, but by considering an array of both institutional and physical features and the water delivery outcomes produced at the household level, we offer new explanations for water disparities within smallholder-operated irrigation systems. We further discuss the ability of user-group members to reshape their water delivery outcomes through information exchange.

Frontiers in socio-environmental research: components, connections, scale, and context

The complex and interdisciplinary nature of socio-environmental (SE) problems has led to numerous efforts to develop organizing frameworks to capture the structural and functional elements of SE systems. We evaluate six leading SE frameworks, i.e., human ecosystem framework, resilience, integrated assessment of ecosystem services, vulnerability framework, coupled human-natural systems, and social-ecological systems framework, with the dual goals of (1) investigating the theoretical core of SE systems research emerging across diverse frameworks and (2) highlighting the gaps and research frontiers brought to the fore by a comparative evaluation. The discussion of the emergent theoretical core is centered on four shared structuring elements of SE systems: components, connections, scale, and context. Cross-cutting research frontiers include: moving beyond singular case studies and small-n studies to meta-analytic comparative work on outcomes in related SE systems; combining descriptive and data-driven modeling approaches to SE systems analysis; and promoting the evolution and refinement of frameworks through empirical application and testing, and interframework learning.