Scenarios

The RE4AFAGRI scenarios

The RE4AFAGRI consortium designed three main scenarios (having an horizon year of 2050) at the center of the modelling efforts:

• Baseline: the baseline scenario represents an extrapolation of recent trends into the future, and it is useful to highlight potential challenges in absence of changes in trends (e.g.,remaining gap in energy, water access and adequate nutrition).

• Improved access: some efforts are made to improve the quality of living in the case-study country, by increasing energy, water, and sanitation access so that the access gap estimated in the baseline(percentage of population remaining without access)is at least halved by 2030. A food nutrition target also aims at ensuring domestic food production by improving crop yields through irrigation.

• Ambitious development: this scenario includes ambitious and ideal targets of universal access to electricity, water, and sanitation by 2030, and domestic agriculture production improving to meet decent living nutrition standards (EAT Lancet diet). In addition, measures to guarantee 100% renewable electricity generation are in place. This scenario ensemble includes different levels of ambitions in improving the production and access to electricity, water infrastructure and water for agriculture, with different grades of investment requirements or secondary impacts on natural resources (e.g., coal or water withdrawals). Additional scenarios can be run upon interest from the modelling team and stakeholders to assess the sensitivity to specific model parameters (e.g., technology costs) or to address specific questions (e.g., intensification vs extensification of agriculture, or achieving targets in 2030 and or 2050 etc.)

The scenarios are characterised in the Table below:

Story/question	RCP scenario	National goals	SSP scenario
“Baseline”	RCP 7.0	Current policies Agriculture: historical trend of production	SSP2
Improved access	RCP 7.0	Electricity access: halving the gap in 2030 water access & sanitation: halving the gap in 2030; Food security: increasing water supply to meet domestic food crops production demand in 2030 (given current diet, no extensification, fertilization, trade)	SSP2
Ambitious development, sustainable targets	RCP7.0 (SSP1, RCP2.6 on land)	Energy universal access, universal water access & sanitation; nutrition security: improve yields to meet future food crop production demand to meet the EAT Lancet diet in 2030; Renewable electricity share = 100% + climate constraints	SSP2

Defining new scenarios

To define new scenarios, underlying data and assumptions should be changed within each model. In particular,

• In WaterCROP:

• In M-LED the user can take two main type of actions:

  • Edit the lines 55-75 of the MLED_hourly.r file, to specify:

    • SSP and RCP scenarios
    • Policy targets
    • Scenario names

  • Edit the scenario_.R files, editing parameters and assumption throughout the script, and in particular between lines 10-1725.

• In OnSSET: [describe "specs file" parameters]

• In NEST: