5
SUB-PROJECT
Integration
The models from subprojects 1, 2 and 4 will be coupled to project the outcomes of changes in enforcement of the Brazilian Forest Code, global climate and agricultural commodity prices on land use and land cover change, water availability and farm incomes. The work undertaken as part of this subproject will reveal the extent to which feedbacks between the land-water system and farmer adaptations alter the projected impacts of changes in the main exogenous drivers. We hypothesize that the extent of impacts of the Brazilian Forest Code, global climate change and agricultural commodity prices on water availability and welfare of farm households will depend on aggregate responses of farmers to changes in blue and/or green water availability. We also hypothesize that farmer responses to variation in water availability will lead to land use decisions that either reinforce or balance the feedback loop between land-use and land-cover change, the climate system, water availability and production.
Data
Climate and land-cover condition data representing alternative Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) will be retrieved from the NCAR Community Earth System Model simulations submitted to the IPCC CMIP5. Land cover in states neighboring Rondônia (i.e. outside the bounds of the ABM) will be approximated using business as usual projects based on rolling averages of the past 10 years of deforestation in each municipality as used for the Amazon Fund.
Methods and Activities
The simulations from Subproject 1 will be applied to two additional sets of climate experiments to model precipitation between 2020 and 2049. Land use and land cover change for these experiments will be generated using a climate/agent-based coupled modeling system on a five-year time interval. Under this methodology, climate data generated by the WRF/SSiB2 model for a period of five years, including precipitation, runoff, and surface temperature, will be downscaled using the hydrologic models from Subproject 2 and used to drive ABM land use and land cover change projections for the next five years. Once completed, ABM projections will be incorporated in the WRF/SSiB2 model for the next five-year step of climate simulations.