Modelling Interactions of Climatic and Agricultural Change on Diffuse Pollution

Project Status: Completed (See Final Report Summary)
Type of Project: Scoping Study
Principal Investigator: Dr Nick Hanley, Stirling University (Email)

Publications, Data and Other Outputs

Objectives

This project will explore the potential of developing a modelling framework to understand the interactions between water quality and water quantity in the context of climate change; and to enable the simulation of alternative policy instruments to achieve the goal of "good ecological status" under the Water Framework Directive.

We do this in the context of climate change predictions, as represented by the latest UKCIP02 predictions, and using an updated version of the LARS-WG stochastic weather generator. Climate change will be linked to changes in productivity of farm crops using the CROPSYST model, which can also generate estimates of nitrate and phosphate run-off, and soil erosion. CROPSYST also allows the modelling of hydrological flows, but these will be linked to catchment-wide hydrological processes using IHACRES.

Farmers' responses to changes in climate, and to changes in CAP support, are crucial to understanding changes in land use, which subsequently impact on water quality and water quantity. These responses will be modelled using optimising farm models developed under a current ESRC project. Finally, we also include an attempt to model the cumulative uncertainty associated with each stage of the overall modeling system.

One main objective of the scoping study is to investigate the problem of matching up these different models, in terms of spatial and temporal resolution, and in terms of the profit/ expected utility maximising approach of economic models. How to sequence flows through the model structure is also a concern, one which has become apparent to the project team in current work on climate change and agriculture funded by ESRC.

The project team is Nick Hanley (economist, project manager); Ashar Aftab (economist, farm modeling); Dugald Tinch (economist, project RA); Andrew Black (hydrologist); Jim Kay (statistician specializing in uncertainty) and Mikhail Semenov, climate modeler. It is a collaboration between the universities of Stirling, Glasgow, Dundee and Durham, and Rothamstead Research Institute.