Rimjhim Aggarwal - US grants

Long-lived coupled natural human systems (CNHs) are often distinguished by how they have evolved the right fit between their biophysical and social sub-systems. Researchers have characterized this fit in terms of the close feedbacks that enable a system to function well when faced with a known set of disturbance regimes. This project addresses a key question that naturally arises when these systems are exposed to a new set of disturbance regimes or novel change as is likely to occur with increased globalization and climate change: to what extent do the interdependencies that developed to strengthen the system's capacity to fit to a certain set of disturbances limit or enhance its capacity to refit to new conditions? To address this question, the project team will focus on a particular class of CNHs - small scale irrigation systems where the built infrastructure plays a critical role in resource provision. A multi-method approach will be employed that begins with the qualitative analysis of a large number of case studies to develop a typology of irrigation systems. A subset of previously examined exemplar cases will be revisited to examine how they have coped with new vulnerabilities that have emerged. In parallel, field experiments will be conducted with resource users and infrastructure providers that apply principles of behavioral economics to social dilemmas that emerge in irrigation systems in order to test the robustness of collective action to different stressors. These will be followed by laboratory experiments with college students to examine whether the findings can be generalized to other systems. Finally, insights from the case studies and experiments will be used to develop formal dynamic models of prototypical irrigation-based CNHs. Using tools from dynamical systems and robust control complemented by numerical experiments and simulation (including agent-based approaches), the qualitative dynamics and associated robustness-vulnerability characteristics of these systems will be studied in order to distill a set of institutional design principles for use in the development of tools for anticipatory governance.

In addition to the study of coupled natural human systems (CNHs) in its own right, this project is motivated by an important practical consideration. The pace at which social and natural systems are currently changing - driven to a large degree by globalization and climate change - has challenged the capacity of several CNHs to self-organize and respond effectively to this change. Ongoing field studies have shown that small scale farms (less than 2 hectares), which constitute 90% of farms worldwide and consume an estimated 70% of developed water supplies, are the most vulnerable to such changes. Since these farms also produce 40% of agricultural output globally and support the majority of world?s poorest people, it is essential to enhance their adaptive capacity in order to maintain food security and alleviate poverty. Focusing on the in-depth study of small-scale irrigation systems, this project pushes ideas of resource governance beyond traditional approaches. Rather than seeking the "best" policies for a specific system under a given set of shocks, it seeks to understand how CNHs cope with change under a wide range of disturbance regimes. The theoretical foundation for the project is based on a key insight from engineering: feedback (of which management and governance in CNHs are examples) can be used to stabilize a system and reduce its sensitivity to a given set of disturbances. However, this stabilizing feedback can increase sensitivity to new types of disturbances. By studying responses to a suite of disturbances, this project helps advance a more nuanced understanding of evolution of CNHs in terms of recognizing how in becoming finely-tuned to certain disturbances, systems become increasingly vulnerable to others. Building on this insight through theoretical modelling as well as case studies and field experiments from a wide variety of settings in the southwestern US, India, Nepal and Thailand, this project will develop a set of tools that will contribute to the capacity of policy makers to better anticipate emerging vulnerabilities and design learning and adaptive mechanisms to cope more effectively with change.

Steering Committee: James Elser, Rimjhim Aggarwal, and Helen Rowe at Arizona State University;
Tauhidur Rahman, University of Arizona; David Vaccari, Stephens Institute of Technology; Anita
Street, US Department of Energy; Robert Mikkelsen, International Plant Nutrition Institute

Intellectual Merit: Phosphorus (P) is an essential element to life and, with few exceptions, a necessary
fertilizer for high agricultural yield. Because P cannot be manufactured and global supply is limited,
this chemical element poses a unique, double-sided threat to sustainability. P scarcity leads to
high prices and poverty for poor farmers in developing countries, but in industrialized nations, excess
P from farms and in urban waste streams degrades downstream water quality. The issues surrounding
P sustainability are deeply complex and involve diverse geological, biogeochemical, economic, and
geopolitical dimensions that are currently unconsolidated. Environmental degradation due to nutrient
runoff and potential threats to global food security urgently call for an end to this disjointed approach
to phosphorus. The goal of the P Sustainability Research Coordination Network (RCN) is to spark an
interdisciplinary synthesis of data, perspectives, and understanding about phosphorus to identify and
implement solutions for P sustainability.

The RCN theme, objectives, and initial topics build upon broad agreement on key P sustainability
challenges reached at a recent Sustainable P Summit (SPS) led by James Elser and colleague Dan Childers.
The RCN will involve two phases centered on three Challenge Areas. Phase I groups will work
on two Challenges: (1) Improving P efficiency in food production; (2) Developing robust pathways
of P recycling. At the Kick-off Workshop, identified Core Members will develop Working Groups
centered around these challenge areas. These Groups will be further populated with At-Large Members
recruited through a widely advertised application process that will allow us to target qualified
graduate students, postdocs, and members of under-represented groups. In Year 3, a Synthesis Workshop
will report on the science and solution outcomes from Phase I and develop new Phase II Working
Groups focused on Challenge 3: Integrating efficiency and recycling to create a sustainable food system.
A Wrap-up Workshop, held early in Year 5, will be held to report on science and solution outcomes
from Phase II and provide the push to finalize outcomes.

Broader Impacts: Central to the P Sustainability RCN will be recruitment of a diverse network of
participants of different professions, ranks, genders, races, ethnicities, and nationalities. The Steering
Committee will reflect this diversity, including three students in ex officio capacity, giving them invaluable
experience in leadership, networking, collaborative science, and policy. To communicate key
aspects of RCN work, we will produce two dynamic, high-quality videos to reach targeted audiences of
farmers, educators, fertilizer industry, and policy makers. The three RCN Workshops will be held in
Washington DC in order to facilitate participation by policy makers, government officials, representatives
of agriculture and the fertilizer industry, and urban planners with the aim of developing research priorities
for the RCN, presenting outcomes and planning implementation of sustainability solutions.

This award provides support for the International Project Office (IPO) of the Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC) project, an international collaborative research project sponsored by the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). UGEC has functioned since 2005, coordinating and facilitating new knowledge generation and dissemination about global environmental change in urban areas, placing special emphasis on collaborative activities that bridge the social and natural sciences as well as national boundaries. Through its catalytic impact on development of new research projects and its networking activities, UGEG has become an international leader in research on urbanization and global environmental change. The IPO has built an international interdisciplinary research coordination network of scholars and practitioners whose work deals with various facets of the interface of cities and the environment, promoting collaboration among academics and practitioners as urban areas prepare to respond to global environmental change. During this third phase of UGEC activity, the IPO will promote the next generation of UGEC research, with an emphasis on synthesizing findings and connecting science to policy. The IPO will promote, coordinate, and disseminate science and policy findings in the UGEC field by actively providing a platform for the docking and synthesis of global case-studies. It also will continue to facilitate connections between research and practice by organizing international workshops and conferences utilizing cutting-edge communication tools, and it will assist in increasing the connections between U.S.-based networks of UGEC scholars and practitioners with their international counterparts.

The UGEC IPO will make significant contributions to UGEC science and policy by facilitating integrative and synthetic understanding springing from new interdisciplinary knowledge. It will encourage innovative conceptual and methodological approaches that link the social sciences with the natural sciences, and it will establish a new platform for the realization of continuous synthesis activities. The IPO will operate at the boundary of science and practice, communicating its integrative efforts to decision makers, practitioners, and other end-users at different scales. Through its support for international collaborative research and its encouragement for the involvement of early-career scientists in such efforts, the UGEC IPO helps address the social, economic, and environmental consequences of urbanization in diverse settings around the globe.

This project explores the effectiveness of legal, institutional, and political mechanisms for realizing human rights in natural resources that invoke sustainability concerns. To date, scholarly approaches to human rights and natural resources have remained largely separate, despite the social and behavioral dimensions of sustainability and the resource dimensions of human rights claims. This project integrates these perspectives in order to enrich human rights scholarship and sustainability research, illuminating the dynamics and complexity of human-nature interactions. Using archival research, comparative-historical analysis, interviews, and quantitative analysis, this project analyzes the mechanisms, actors, and pathways by which human rights and sustainability goals might be fulfilled. Three megacities were chosen as the sites for analysis because of the extreme governance challenges they face due to the confluence of rapid urbanization, illegal housing, migration, poverty, inequality, and water scarcity. All of these factors fundamentally affect public health, social equity, and the environment. Research objectives include documenting and evaluating the role of legal and non-legal mechanisms in realizing human rights and sustainability norms for water and sanitation; evaluating the role of state and non-state actors in implementing social rights; and identifying and comparatively analyzing configurations of mechanisms and pathways across research sites and sectors to see when and how they operate more or less effectively. An important outcome will be the identification of practical strategies for making social rights real in places where it is difficult to do so.

The policy significance of rights to natural resources gives the project substantial broader impacts. Findings will be made available to respondents as well as to international development agencies via a web portal and in-country presentations. The project will also expand international research networks, foster curricular development at home and abroad, and expose U.S. students to cross-national research.

In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on the processes and interactions among food, energy, and water systems, or the so-called food-energy-water (FEW) nexus, and the resulting implications for sustainability, resilience, and security. Food represents agricultural trade and consumption and is a critical component of a region's economy. Energy is required to supply and treat water for agriculture, municipal, and industrial uses, as well as to mechanize agricultural activities. Water is used for human and industrial consumption, crop irrigation, and energy production. While the multifaceted interactions between food, energy and water are often framed as threats or stresses of one system upon the others, basic understanding of the feedback dynamics is necessary for identifying synergies and potential efficiencies. Yet, despite known interrelationships at the FEW nexus, policy, planning, and management decisions for food, energy, and water are typically made in isolation from one another without full consideration of the tradeoffs between sectors. This is primarily because of the complexity of each isolated system, which makes understanding the interconnections between systems difficult to identify let alone assess in an integrated manner. Despite this challenge, knowledge of the linkages, synergies, and conflicts in the FEW nexus is desperately needed to provide evidence-based decision-making for policies in each sector that are most likely to produce positive effects in the other sectors. To achieve such integration, decision makers need to incorporate information about national, regional, and local scale impacts of food-energy-water interactions into the development of robust policy decisions across a range of future conditions. In this way, policies can be developed that can insure resilience of the FEW nexus under variable climate conditions and futures to help ensure public well-being and sustainable growth.

The overarching goal of this research is to develop basic interdisciplinary scientific understanding of food, energy, and water system dynamics to inform an integrated modeling, visualization, and decision support infrastructure for comprehensive FEW systems. This will require the development of (i) a multi-resolution integrated modeling framework that explicitly captures the feedbacks among food, energy and water sectors; and (ii) a visualization infrastructure that enables model composition and reveals cascading effects across the three FEW areas as well as their multivariate spatiotemporal uncertainties. Such an infrastructure needs to be easy to use with a seamless integration of analytical and visual tools, adaptable to new algorithms, and should empower individuals to gain knowledge about their data and the associated uncertainty. To test the proposed framework, the focus of this project will be on a use case in Arizona, the Phoenix Active Management Area (AMA). The Phoenix AMA is a compelling case study for exploring the FEW nexus at sub-regional scale and is ideal to design and test an integrated modeling, visualization, and decision support framework to interactively explore the interconnections of the FEW systems and support effective resource management and human decision making. While the focus is on a specific study region, the long-term outcome of this proposal is to create a flexible and multiscale visualization and decision support infrastructure that could be easily adapted to other locations. Broader impacts of the research program include: 1) infrastructure for policy, research and education in the form of an anticipatory modeling framework; 2) expanding research in decision making under uncertainty for sustainability within the context of multi-directional linkages to FEW nexus, and; 3) enhanced partnerships between computer science, hydrology, agriculture, economics and sustainability to encourage the development of infrastructure that enables model coupling, anticipatory analysis and stakeholder engagement. Additional information can be found at the project website (http://vader.lab.asu.edu/VA-INFEWS) including open source software, course learning modules and other material.