REAL
REAL focuses on the development and application of systemic economic models at the urban and regional levels. Since 2015, REAL has hosted more than 110 graduate students and visiting scholars from China, Brazil, Columbia, USA, Chile and Spain among other countries.
Please join us on
Friday, December 4, 2020
9:00-10:00 a.m. CST
Join Zoom Meeting by clicking here
Meeting ID: 997 1523 2314
Passcode: 923169
Landon Marston
Professor, Virginia Tech
lmarston@vt.edu
"Reducing Water Scarcity by Improving Water Productivity"
Nearly one-sixth of U.S. river basins are unable to consistently meet societal water demands while also providing sufficient water for the environment. Water scarcity is expected to intensify and spread as populations increase, new water demands emerge, and climate changes. Improving water productivity by meeting realistic benchmarks for all water users could allow U.S. communities to expand economic activity and improve environmental flows. Here we utilize a spatially detailed database of water productivity to set realistic benchmarks for over 400 industries and products. We assess unrealized water savings achievable by each industry in each river basin within the conterminous U.S. by bringing all water users up to industry- and region-specific water productivity benchmarks. Some of the most water-stressed areas throughout the U.S. West and South have the greatest potential for water savings, with around half of these water savings obtained by improving water productivity in the production of corn, cotton, and alfalfa. By incorporating benchmark-meeting water savings within a national hydrological model (WaSSI), we demonstrate that depletion of river flows across Western U.S. regions can be reduced on average by 6.2–23.2%, without reducing economic production. Lastly, we employ an environmentally extended input-output model to identify the U.S. industries and locations that can make the biggest impact by working with their suppliers to reduce water use ‘upstream’ in their supply chain. The agriculture and manufacturing sectors have the largest indirect water footprint due to their reliance on water-intensive inputs but these sectors also show the greatest capacity to reduce water consumption throughout their supply chains.
and
Sandy Dall'erba
Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
dallerba@illinois.edu
"Identifying the Atmospheric and Economic Key Drivers of Global Air Pollution Change: A Combined SDA Approach"
The transmission of pollution across countries has been studied through the lens of atmospheric chemical transport or through its content in international trade, but only a handful of studies consider both channels concurrently. Yet, the rare exceptions do not highlight the economic sector(s) at the origin of the problem and thus fail to identify effective abatement strategies. In this paper, we integrate environmentally extended input-output trade linkages with physical pathways of carbon monoxide atmospheric transport to uncover the key drivers of the changes in intercountry pollution transmission. Based on a five-region model, the results indicate that most of the CO experienced in a country comes from its own production which is primarily destined to the domestic market; yet, emissions due to upwind producers are not negligible. It is especially true for South Korea which received from China a flow of CO emissions above the level it produced itself. By providing new insights into the interconnected economic and geographic sources of air pollution, this paper suggests more nuanced global emission abatement policies than the consumer-focused or producer-focused approaches currently used.
