Simulating the future of the global agro-food system
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34th Chaos Communication Congress143 / 167
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:14
Give a warm applause for Dr. Benjamin Leo Borodilski, he is a postdoctoral researcher
00:34
at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and he is designing quantitative
00:42
computer models and global nitrogen cycle simulation. So it's like civilization aid, nor was more realistic. And what we can learn from it and how we can use it, you will hear now.
01:08
What we are doing there is we are doing computer simulations of all kinds of sciences from natural sciences to social sciences, but this campus has actually a long history
01:24
already of science. So it used to be the astrophysical observatory and the meteorological observatory, and quite a few experiments were carried out there, so there was the G value measured, the value
01:41
of gravity, the first earthquake was recorded, or some equations of the relativity theory of the field equations were solved in this former institute. Since 1990 now, it's the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and what you
02:00
can see nicely here, these buildings are still the old cupolas which have inside or which used to have inside large telescopes. And these telescopes are a bit a symbol for the first scientific revolution, the first
02:20
and about 400 years ago. And this scientific revolution was sparked by the technical development of lenses which allowed you to use microscopes or telescopes, and this opened up a new field of research because suddenly you could see things which were quite small, even larger, you could see
02:46
things in detail, and you suddenly had a view inside the huge complexity, both inside a cell or inside of our universe. Some scholars argue that today now we are living in the second Copernican revolution,
03:04
and this second Copernican revolution is triggered by the development of so-called microscopes. Probably nobody of you ever heard this word, because it's invented, hello translators, but maybe you can think what it means.
03:21
It's kind of the inverse of a microscope. Instead of showing you things in more detail, actually it does the reverse. It shows you things in less detail. It reduces the complexity of the real world, and this is something that is really necessary because the complexity of the real world is sometimes overwhelming, and if you want
03:41
to make decisions, we sometimes need simpler versions of the real world to understand them. So how can a microscope look like? The first approach is quite straightforward. If you want to see something in less detail, you just go one step back, or two step backs,
04:02
or even further. So, one option is a satellite. If you look from a satellite on the earth, you can see the macrodevelopment on the planet. Things that you can see is first of all, the earth is quite a beautiful planet, but
04:21
you can also see what's happening on the planet right now, that streets are going into pristine forests, that we are burning down forests all over the world, that at night time the earth is still illuminated by electric lights from the cities, and you can see how
04:42
strongly we already shape the way the planet looks like today. You can clearly see that we are now living already in the Anthropocene. A second option to see the earth system in a reduced form is you can rebuild it in a smaller scale.
05:01
This has been carried out in the 1990s with the Biosphere 2 experiment. It's basically a whole earth system in a glasshouse, in a confined glasshouse, which has an ocean, which has a rainforest, and desert, and also eight human scientists living within, and you can see it as a successful failure in the way that, after a very short
05:28
time already, the whole ecosystem collapsed, the fish in the oceans died, the ecosystems were run over by cockroaches and ants, the CO2 levels rose extremely, and the scientists
05:43
which were basically confined in this were getting quite hungry, and towards the end of the experiments, they actually had to import food from outside of the system. So it's not as easy to rebuild such an earth system, and actually we can be happy
06:00
that we are living in such a stable one as we have currently on the planet earth. Now, the last, the third option of reducing complexity is we put the real world into a set of equations, a computer model, and use this computer model to simulate the earth
06:21
system. There's a clear advantage of this. First of all, it's quite cheap, so you can repeat it. You can do several, well, thousands of simulations, and, of course, in reality, we only have one planet, right? So we can only carry out one experiment, and that's the experiment we are currently
06:42
living in, so there's no option to repeat it if we fucked up the climate or something else. So, this has been the first computer model, or the first widely known computer model,
07:01
it's the world three model from 1972, known by the report the limits of growth of the club of Rome. The basic message was that if you have exponential growth of the population and exponential resources, there will be one point where the social system collapses, where the population
07:25
is going down up to a level where the planet can sustain it again. Of course, this was one of the first computer models. It was really simple. It was also being heavily criticised for being oversimplified, and luckily for us, those
07:43
projections didn't become true. But it already shows by triggering off quite a big debate that it was quite a useful computer model, because suddenly we were thinking long periods forward, and, of course,
08:02
we did not stop with this one computer model, but we continuously further developed it. This was 1972, more than 35 years ago, and since then, of course, computers became much more powerful, and, of course, also some bit slower technological progress in the science
08:25
community happened, so we are still on the challenge of making good simplified computer models. Of course, they are wrong. That's what a model is always, because it's simplified. It leaves out processes that are important, but they're useful for us for decision-making.
08:43
So, at Potsdam Institute, we have quite an ensemble of different models. Here you can see, for example, climate models feeding information to a vegetation model which calculates carbon stocks and natural vegetation, crop yields, hydrology, and so on.
09:03
Then we have information from such a vegetation model being handed over to a land use and agriculture model which is the model called Magpie, and then we also have a macroeconomic model and energy model which simulates the development of the industry, of the service
09:22
sector, of the energy sector, and, of course, also always the greenhouse gas emissions. I want to focus today on the Magpie model. Magpie stands for model of agricultural production and its impact on the environment. This is the model I'm working with. It's developed by a large group of approximately currently 15 people of various scientific
09:49
backgrounds. We have economists, we have physicists, we have biologists, geologists, and so on, and
10:01
the basic question that we want to answer with our model is how will the agrofood system look like in the year 2050 and beyond? Why is this important? Probably for you, agriculture is not so important, hardly anyone still works in agriculture, but for our planet, agriculture is really important.
10:22
It's our main interface with the nature. If you look at our planet, 30 per cent of the terrestrial surface is covered by agriculture, either by cropland or pastures. If you look at greenhouse gas emissions, 25 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions come from land use change and agriculture, so, again, struggling with agriculture.
10:46
If you look at water, 70 per cent of human water withdrawals are for irrigation water. If you look at water pollution at herbicides, at biodiversity, always there is agriculture as one of the major drivers.
11:01
Also, we are now really changing the nutrient cycles of the world, increasing, for example, the nitrogen cycle by factor 304 relatively to earlier years. And there's also another thing, of course, agriculture is also really important for
11:20
us humans because we can live without energy, we can't live without food, and if you look at the global 19 leading risk factors worldwide for preliminary death, 11 of them are connected somehow to nutrition.
11:42
So either we eat too much, which is red, or too little, which is green. It's something like iron sink deficiency, vitamin A deficiency, suboptimal breast-feeding, but on the other hand, there's also a lot of things connected to unhealthy diets like high blood pressure, high blood glucose, overweight and obesity.
12:04
On these top 19, you cannot find wars or terrorism or something like that, but it's really mostly about chronic diseases, and most of the chronic diseases are strongly connected with our daily diets. So how does such a model look like?
12:21
Basically, we start off with the food requirements. What do people actually eat? And what do they actually need as food to sustain their body functions? Well, this of course depends on how large the population is and what each of them eats. At the moment, we are already at a world population of 7.6 billion, and we are still
12:47
growing. We will most likely be 8.5 to 10 billion people in the year 2050, so then we need to do some more refragmentation here.
13:02
And eventually afterwards, there is an option that it might decline or further increase, and this depends a lot on education and on family planning. At the same time, what people need to sustain their body functions per capita is quite
13:26
always the same, actually. There are some differences depending on demography. You can see that Africa has a lower requirement because there are a lot of young kids are In contrast, in China, a lot of young adults, you have high food requirements.
13:43
But of course, this will shift as soon as we have demographic change in the future, and then we will have in contrast high food requirements in Africa per capita. But in general, the range is really low, 2,000 to 2,300 kilocalories per capita per day in population average. But this is of course what the people would require, what they actually consume is
14:06
much more. So you can see in Germany, we have 3,500 kilocalories. In India, it's closer to the food requirements of 2,450. But you can also see not only that there's a lot of overconsumption, you can also see
14:22
that the diets are quite different. In Germany, we eat quite a lot of animal products, which people in Nigeria or India don't. And we actually don't eat too much fruits and vegetables, which is a shame for us.
14:42
But you can see that we consume about one-third more than we need. And what's the reason for this? Basically it's that we waste quite a substantial fraction of our food. About 30% of the food gets wasted in households just because people, well, don't care too
15:03
much about it. And you can see a quite strong correlation. So as soon as people increase their living standards, as soon as the human development index increases, you also see that the food waste is starting or the overconsumption.
15:23
This also includes overconsumption in the sense that people eat more calories, but also the window is quite narrow. Most of it is food waste. And the same you can see for per capita calories or the share of livestock products.
15:42
You can see that the share of livestock products strongly increases with income. On the left you see just a scatterplot between income and livestock share for all countries of the world for the last 50 years. And you can see that countries strongly increase their mid-consumption, especially when they
16:02
move from very low incomes to medium incomes. For very high incomes, eventually the livestock share declines again. And you see the same actually also for processed foods like oil, sugar, consumption goes up. Unfortunately, you don't see it for fruits and vegetables, which would be healthy. But there it saturates quite as an early income.
16:24
And then, of course, the food demand has to be satisfied by production. Before that, there is some trade, international trade is increasing over the last decades quite strongly, much more than production. And next to food demand, there is also the demand for materials, but also for bioenergy
16:44
which will play a role, an increasing role, I don't know if you heard the talk before, which may play an increasing role in the future if we want to mitigate climate change because bioenergy is one option to take CO2 emissions again out of the atmosphere.
17:03
Then food is of course also processed and here the livestock products really play a huge role because in order to feed one or in order to produce one calorie of livestock products, you need multiple plant calories to feed the animal.
17:20
At the moment, approximately half of the proteins that are produced worldwide on the crop lands are fed to animals. And additionally also a large, even larger quantity of pasture which is grazed by animals. And finally, we have crops and these crops are standing on the land.
17:44
And here you can see some land use dynamics, here you can see a projection or a scenario, a future scenario of how the crop land might expand in the future. Quite strong expansion, especially in the tropical areas because they are also the population
18:02
growth is largest. And next to land use, this also, well, on the one hand, you have crop land expansion but this is not the only option, of course, to increase production. In the past, this made up only 10% of the increase of production. The largest increase actually came always from intensification of the existing areas.
18:24
And here you can see basically the crop yields that we would need in the future in order to sustain our or to fulfil the demand. And finally, our model also considers all the interactions with the biochemical cycles,
18:44
so how do we change the nitrogen, the carbon, the phosphorus cycle, also how will water scarcity change, this is a picture where you can see the water scarcity in 2010 and 2050, so it's basically not the water scarcity but how much of the water that is available
19:01
will be under use. And the nitrogen cycle is the third most important biochemical cycle of the world has been changed tremendously by modern agriculture. We are now about five times the amount of nitrogen which flows through the cycle than in pre-industrial times.
19:24
And finally, we end up with emissions and, well, if we assume a scenario where we don't take action, we can assume that, or we simulate that the emissions will further increase while actually in order to keep or stay below the two-degree aim, we would actually
19:44
need the land use sector to sequester carbon, so we need to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, this is something that only the land use sector can provide at low cost, either through afforestation, through plantation of biomass, or through accumulation of carbon in soils.
20:05
So this is the whole integrated model, and the great thing is that, well, it's an optimisation model where everything influences everything, so if you put a carbon price in, this will change the whole supply chain, it will change the food demand, it will change the global
20:23
trade patterns, it will change the land use pattern. You can also see the interactions, for example, between the nitrogen and the water cycle, or how, well, but you can also see quite well the trade-offs that exist in our system.
20:42
So if you only want to solve one specific aim, it's still, well, quite easily possible, but as soon as you have multiple goals, for example, if you want to provide enough food for the whole world population, this will also require you to increase your food production,
21:03
and then you will have the environmental impacts. If you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, you will need bio energy, and this of course also has negative impacts again on biodiversity, on food consumption, on food prices, and so on. So it's a very complex system, and it's really a challenge, but it's possible to transform
21:30
our society sustainably that we actually meet all these goals at the same time. What's really crucial there is, on the one hand, the consumption side, so we really
21:43
need to reduce food waste, and we need to reduce the consumption of animal products by large scale, so having animal consumption, having the food waste in western society would be something that we should aim for, and this is really difficult. At the same time, the whole production system can be much more efficient.
22:05
Small price on carbon would be sufficient to trigger off technical innovations probably, and to implement low-cost carbon mitigation technologies. But these are probably the two things that we need most.
22:20
We need a policy that puts prices on emissions, on carbon, on nitrogen, on water pollution, and we need some kind of policies that change the preferences of the people in a way that they, for example, education, school education for what is a healthy diet, how do you cook
22:44
at home, and so on. All these kinds of projects have to be really encouraged. So, what can you do? One advice I want to give out is get involved in modelling.
23:02
Most of us are actually, well, we are not computer scientists from the beginning, but we have to learn quite a lot of this, but we are rather coming from disciplinary backgrounds, economists, or biologists, or something like that, but most of our time
23:22
is actually software development, and it's not that we don't want software developers, it's just that few people actually apply there. So, I think putting up the standards of software development in the whole field would be really a great thing. The second thing is there's a lot of data out, and there's a lot of, well, also great
23:49
science that could be communicated using good visualisation techniques, using also maybe artistic projects, and so on. Just want to give you one example before I come to the question and answer.
24:03
In the last year, we made a workshop with art students who developed interactive installations using our data. For example, here it's an audio installation where people could hear the sound of different scenarios, depending on whether it's a scenario where all the forests are cut down and you
24:26
have rather agricultural sounds, or more urban sounds in another scenario. Or maybe I just pick one more because we have limited time. This is an artwork by a student from Bangladesh, and she created a climate box.
24:48
You can enter this climate box, throw in a coin, and then using an Arduino, it all starts moving. You get told the story of climate change, but at the same time also the weather in
25:01
the climate box is changing, so suddenly it becomes hotter, and there's a fan blowing in hot air, and suddenly it starts raining, and there's flashlights, and then if you don't spend more money on it, then it becomes even worse and worse and worse.
25:21
So this artwork was actually inspired because she said, well, people back home, they see climate change as something abstract, but as long as they don't feel it, they wouldn't do something. So she came up with this idea. Now I'm ready for questions and answers.
25:41
Thank you very much. Everybody with questions, please go to the microphones in the room and internet over the signal angels.
26:01
So microphone one, please. Oops, it's charged. I got an electrocution here. Thanks for the talk. One question. When you looked at the needs of people, you spoke about calorie requirements. However, nutrition is much more than calories, especially in, not in Germany, but in Sahel
26:22
area, when you further reduce the animal protein part, you get problems with malnutrition. Is that something you factor in, or it's just plain calories and you eat sorghum with sorghum? No, of course, dietary diversity is really important. I would not say that animal protein is the only way of solving this because you can
26:48
have a balanced diet also without animal protein. But it's important. Actually, one of the most important challenges is to drive up the consumption of vegetables and fruits by several factors, and there's hardly any positive limitation to the, especially
27:12
for vegetables, to the health impacts of higher consumption of vegetables and fruits. Of course, we look at the dietary composition, and there we also don't only look at livestock
27:26
versus plant calories, but also now on fruits and vegetables, and on processed calories. But, yes, of course, I think it's a major problem that we should not play out goals
27:41
like food security against goals like climate change. We need to simply tackle both of them, and as urgently as possible. Thanks. We have five minutes. Next, microphone number two, please.
28:01
I think I'm too small for this one. I've got two questions. You were talking about trade-offs. What would you think is the best solution to the crucial trade-off between biodiversity
28:20
and land conversion for food security? The second question is, you were talking about how important it is that we invest in societies to drive up our vegetable and fruit consumption, but this again would mean that we shift the land usage for high-calorie foods, even if they are not dairy or livestock in any way,
28:48
so that again we use more land, and this again would cause more, well, rivalry between global food users. Isn't this contradictory to food security, and aren't we quite healthy already if we
29:05
stopped eating sugar like crazy? Thank you. I forgot the first question again. What was the first question? The trade-off between land conversion and biodiversity.
29:21
Yes, so there is certainly a trade-off between those two, but as I said before, in the past, only 10 per cent, or the cropland in the last 50 years only increased by approximately 10, 11 per cent, and all the rest of the productivity improvements were actually
29:41
reached on the area. At the moment, there are quite large yield gaps in wide areas of the world where you could actually intensify, and where it would be actually good to intensify the systems to a certain degree, and without any land expansion actually necessary.
30:03
There are certain areas where I guess land expansion is possible. It's always a trade-off, of course, and we are trying to build in exactly this trade-off by now, including biodiversity indicators in our model, but this is still a work in progress.
30:20
To the second question on the fruits and vegetables, fruits and vegetables actually make up only a tiny share of current land use. I think less than 10 per cent, definitely. At the same time, they are producing quite high yields because it's not the land which is the main resource there, but it's labour which goes in, and capital.
30:45
It's not necessarily a clean production either, because you have large nutrient run-offs, often large pesticide use, but in terms of land use, it's not such a bad thing. You get quite high tons of produce out of a vegetable farm.
31:04
But, of course, there are also trade-offs here. There is a sustainable, probably sugar is providing really cheap calories without large environmental footprint if you calculate it per calorie. In contrast, fruits and vegetables provide very little calories but provide very nutritious
31:22
food in terms of fibre, vitamins, and so on. We have a lot of questions. I see eight and one from the internet. We have just two minutes, so I take one from the internet, one from five, and I ask everybody else to ask the speaker afterwards.
31:40
He is here and he answers all your questions. So, internet, what is your question? Okay, so the IC asks, how do I get involved in modelling? Can I play with magpie by downloading code and data somewhere? Hello, internet. The model will become open source next year, so we are currently in the process of the
32:06
whole legal stuff of making it open source, so the next model version of our model will be published open source.
32:20
Microphone five, please. Hi, thanks for the great talk. Last year, there was also an awesome talk about plant-based food innovation that is science-based. My question is twofold. First, do you implement technological innovation that would lead to a more plant-based diet,
32:40
and in general in the model? And the second one, how hopeful are you personally that those will have an important impact in the future? You're speaking now of some kind of plant-based meat replacement products and so on. Yes, we actually published a study or a commentary this year also on a quite extreme
33:04
case of this which is basically landless food production, so you can breed microbes based on fertiliser and energy. It's a kind of a space food technology. It was developed by the Russians, but now it actually becomes commercially cheap.
33:27
I guess it will certainly happen for certain protein foods, so it will, for example, replace soybean or fish meal in animal feeding to a certain proportion.
33:42
I'm not so sure about the actual nutrition value of this, or about, well, I'm a bit sceptical how positive I would judge it, but I would judge it quite realistic. Also, for the whole meat replacement products based on plant-based, on plant basis, I
34:07
think it will become economically just cheaper and then you will have a tipping point where simply because out of economic reason it's cheaper, people will reduce their meat consumption or, for example, a burger will consist of half fake meat and half real meat because
34:24
it's cheaper. And I think this transformation will happen. Somehow the breeding animals just for their meat seems a technology which is somehow outdated for the 21st century, if you ask me.
34:42
Then give more than a big applause to Dr. Benjamin Leon... Thank you.