About
ABC Telecoupling aims to provide a comprehensive framework, a complex systems modeling approach and a web-based decision support system to find solutions that enhance food security for all, while ensuring a sustainable earth. Telecoupling is an integrative way to study socioeconomic and environmental interactions among distant areas.
The objectives of ABC Telecoupling are to:
- Enhance the capacity to predict effects from shifts in food flows and land use
- Deliver tools to facilitate policy changes to improve food security, while ensuring a more sustainable environment.
- Increase cooperation among major research and stakeholder groups in major food production and consuming countries.
- Train a new generation alert to minimise negative consequences from changes in land use worldwide.
Please check the project website for more information on partners, meetings, fieldwork and publications:
https://www.nepam.unicamp.br/telecoupling/
Results
- Telecouplings are operating through market mechanisms such as the international trade of agricultural inputs (e.g., fertilisers) and products (e.g., soybean).
- Telecouplings matter for local decisions. For example, the unsuitability of producing a given agricultural crop (e.g., soy) with low productivity standards in one country (e.g., China) when compared to other countries (e.g., Brazil), foster local agents (e.g., Chinese Government) to take decisions towards relying on imports (and discouraging local producers from producing it, and changing to other crops), finally affecting decision-making in long distant nations.
- Not only market mechanisms, but also natural suitability (e.g., topography, soil, temperature, precipitations), demands for ecosystem services, and international context (e.g., current trade tariffs) can dictate telecouplings and decision-making processes across distances.
- Spillover systems are affected by the flows of agricultural commodities. A statistical approach identified spillover systems based on trade agreements to foster sustainable soybean/cattle production in the Brazilian Amazon.
- The "soybean trap" describes how soybean producers, induced by the telecoupled system, are tied with international, national and regional forces pushing them to risky financial situations.
- A debate around the value of climate change research and human sciences (including political sciences and economics), which derived processes such as trade war.