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Abstract The Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region plays key roles in both meeting global agricultural demands and maintaining carbon sinks due to its abundant land and water resources. In this study we use the Global Change Analysis Model to evaluate the opportunities and challenges posed by two global‐scale drivers: agricultural market integration (i.e., reduction of trade barriers) and land‐based climate mitigation policy. We evaluate their potential individual and combined impacts on agricultural production and trade revenues across LAC's economies through mid‐century, as well as the resulting impacts on agricultural consumers and integrated land‐water‐climate systems across LAC's diverse sub‐regions. Increased global market integration results in increased agricultural production and trade revenues for many LAC economies, driven by their evolving comparative advantages. Climate mitigation measures on CO2and non‐CO2greenhouse gases increase revenues due to increased agricultural prices from land competition and emissions abatement. The combined outcomes from both drivers are complex and sometimes non‐linear, highlighting the importance of understanding the interactions between multiple drivers. Our results show that increased agricultural production and trade opportunities, from either of the two drivers, pose significant trade‐offs that require careful multi‐sectoral planning, such as emissions reduction challenges, potential loss of livestock production when pursuing land‐based climate mitigation strategies, increased consumer expenditures, and changes in land‐use or water withdrawals, resulting in deforestation or water scarcity pressures. There is considerable heterogeneity in economic and environmental outcomes across LAC sub‐regions and agricultural commodities, illustrating the value of considering outcomes at finer scales.
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Drivers of Future Physical Water Scarcity and Its Economic Impacts in Latin America and the Caribbean
Abstract Future water scarcity is a global concern with impacts across the energy, water, and land (EWL) sectors. Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are significant producers of agricultural goods, so disruptions resulting from water scarcity in LAC have global importance. Understanding where water scarcity in LAC could occur and what could exacerbate it is critical for strategic resource management and planning, both regionally and globally. Assessing future water scarcity in LAC is challenging given the complex interactions among the EWL sectors and the multiple uncertainties acting across spatial scales. To illuminate these dynamics, we use scenario discovery on a large ensemble representing diverse futures simulated using an integrated human‐environmental systems model. We quantify future water scarcity and its economic impacts across several physical and economic metrics. We find that future levels of reservoir storage expansion could be a significant driver of physical and economic water scarcity, highlighting the importance of strategic water infrastructure development in maintaining future water availability. Changes in crop profit are driven by both water supply and demand, emphasizing the complexity of EWL multisector dynamics. While most of LAC is poised to have abundant land and water resources available for future development, basins in Mexico and along the Pacific coast of South America experience high exposure to severe outcomes and uncertainty across outcomes for at least one metric. We find that drivers of severe scarcity vary spatially and across metrics, highlighting the region's heterogeneity and the importance of considering multiple metrics to assess water scarcity.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1855982
- PAR ID:
- 10444116
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.1029
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Earth's Future
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 2328-4277
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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