Abstract
Achieving sustainable development requires understanding how human behavior and the environment interact across spatial scales. In particular, knowing how to manage tradeoffs between the environment and the economy, or between one spatial scale and another, necessitates a modeling approach that allows these different components to interact. Existing integrated local and global analyses provide key insights, but often fail to capture ‘meso-scale’ phenomena that operate at scales between the local and the global, leading to erroneous predictions and a constrained scope of analysis. Meso-scale phenomena are difficult to model because of their complexity and computational challenges, where adding additional scales can increase model run-time exponentially. These additions, however, are necessary to make models that include sufficient detail for policy-makers to assess tradeoffs. Here, we synthesize research that explicitly includes meso-scale phenomena and assess where further efforts might be fruitful in improving our predictions and expanding the scope of questions that sustainability science can answer. We emphasize five categories of models relevant to sustainability science, including biophysical models, integrated assessment models, land-use change models, earth-economy models and spatial downscaling models. We outline the technical and methodological challenges present in these areas of research and discuss seven directions for future research that will improve coverage of meso-scale effects. Additionally, we provide a specific worked example that shows the challenges present, and possible solutions, for modeling meso-scale phenomena in integrated earth-economy models.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 025007 |
Journal | Environmental Research Letters |
Volume | 18 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 7 Feb 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research was supported by funding provided by the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station at the University of Minnesota. All authors declare no conflicts of interest with this manuscript. Dr Johnson led the research, created figures and contributed to the text. All other authors contributed to the text and helped frame the overall research. R C H was funded by the Novo Nordisk Challenge Programme Grant No. NNF20OC0060118.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd.
Data Availability Statement
No new data were created or analyzed in this studyKeywords
- economics
- integrated assessment modeling
- interdisciplinary
- meso
- sustainability