Abstract for: Reinforcing feedback loop between climate impact and agriculture emissions – A global perspective

This paper presents a newly developed System Dynamics (SD) Economic Risk Resources and Environment (ERRE) model, a global impact assessment model whose purpose is to address the social and financial risks emerging from the dynamics of long term growth while interacting with global limits. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate, that while climate change increases in its magnitude, food losses are generated. However, there is a relative balancing effect from food systems to increase assets and production to still satisfy demand despite the loss in productivity. In the absence of mitigating policies and technologies, this can lead to the reinforcing feedback loop where the worse the impact of climate on food, the higher the emissions from agriculture, and then the worse the impact on food. After a calibration of the model, we provide a sensitivity analysis on extreme climate change scenarios. The analysis shows the existence of such a feedback loop, which must be taken in consideration by policy makers while tackling issues over lower than global domains. In fact, future development of the ERRE in the area of lower scale system modelling are identified focusing on what can be called Complex Inertial Networks or Macro-Agent Based modelling.