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Imagine a future with clean rivers and lakes, resilient and thriving farms, and biodiverse ecosystems. How could we get there? And is it possible to have it all?
The FEWscapes project team at University of Wisconsin-Madison is excited to make public four scenarios for the future of the Upper Midwest that attempt to answer these big questions.
Six years in the making, the scenarios are intended to help advance knowledge and support decision-making for food, energy, water, and ecosystem security in the Upper Mississippi River Basin, a five-state portion of North America’s largest watershed that includes parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri.
Scenarios are explorations of “what if.” They are hypothetical storylines that play out plausible, contrasting trajectories of current trends and events into the future and incorporate real-world data to reveal possible future outcomes.
According to Chris Kucharik, FEWscapes’ principal investigator and a professor of agronomy and environmental studies, scenarios matter because trying to understand possible future trajectories can help us make better decisions today.
“Our climate and landscapes are changing quickly and in ways that present risks and uncertainties for the sustainability of our basic needs, such as food, energy, and water,” says Kucharik. “Scenarios are a way to explore the outcomes of future decision-making related to land use, land management, and policy in the context of a changing climate.”
To develop the FEWscapes scenarios, the research team collaborated with dozens of agriculture and natural resources practitioners from the region to envision ways to achieve ambitious goals for food production, low-carbon energy, water quality, and ecosystem health in the Upper Mississippi River Basin to the year 2050. They gathered the practitioners’ input through a series of virtual workshops, a process led by UW-Madison Division of Extension.
According to project researcher Eric Booth, the importance of collaborating with these practitioners was twofold.
“We needed to expand our collective imagination well beyond that of the research team, and the community should share ownership of these scenarios because they will be the ones acting to shape a desirable future in the Basin,” says Booth.
The resulting four FEWscapes scenarios focus specifically on landscape and climate change in the basin. Each scenario has a different driving land-use solution to address nutrient and soil loss, a problem that impacts food and bioenergy production, water quality, and ecosystem health.
The scenario storylines include a suite of other social and political changes, which are based in inklings from today, to help explain how the futures could unfold.
- In Cropland Conservation, the driving land-use solution is ubiquitous use of agricultural conservation practices, such as cover crops and saturated buffers, that blanket 75% of the agricultural land in the basin.
- In America’s Pasture, a grazing movement, spurred by a drastic decline in corn ethanol demand and production, leads to a widespread transformation of cropland to perennial agriculture, resulting in half of all farmland in pasture and agroforestry by 2050.
- Restoration Agriculture imagines a future in which half of all farmland in the basin is converted back to the ecosystems they once were – prairies, forests, and wetlands – and their stewardship becomes part of the farming enterprise.
- Hotspots for Transformation is a mix of the other three. Policies target land that is particularly problematic for water quality, and farmers capitalize on a wave of incentives to adopt a medley of conservation practices, ecosystem restoration, and/or perennial agriculture to help cut nutrient loss.
“We recognize that many of the goals voiced by the community are lofty and, therefore, require a degree of transformative change to achieve them. Scenario thinking is a way to get out of the trap of focusing only on what appears to be ‘realistic’ in the short-term and having the space to explore bigger changes,” says Booth.
The scenarios are more than just stories. The research team used a suite of scientific models that simulate the land-use changes and associated natural processes, such as photosynthesis and the water cycle, that occur in each scenario and produce projected outcomes for future food and biofuel production, water quality, and biodiversity metrics.
The model results can help illuminate whether the visions from the scenarios could actually achieve the desired future goals and what tradeoffs may need to be considered.
The models also simulated how the climate – specifically changing precipitation and temperature patterns – could influence future outcomes. The research team used existing climate projections produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that zoom in on the Upper Mississippi River Basin.
The model results underscore the powerful influence the climate will have on how close we can get to our goals.
“These climate projections suggest the future will likely bring warmer air temperatures and more extreme and variable precipitation patterns. This means both flooding and drought could occur more frequently than they do today,” says project researcher Kelsie Ferin. “These changes are likely to have major impacts, especially if we continue with our current land management practices.”
So, can we have it all? Do any of the scenarios reach all of the goals for food and low-carbon energy production, water quality, and ecosystem health?
The short answer is no.
“Previous research has shown that our landscapes may not be able to provide us the desired levels of food production, bioenergy production, water quality, and biodiversity simultaneously,” says Kucharik. “The FEWscapes scenarios validate that there will be significant tradeoffs between these nature-based benefits, where significant quantities can be achieved for some, but at the sacrifice of others.”
Ultimately, the scenarios are meant to influence the decision-making process, rather than its end point, by highlighting what is necessary and achievable to get a desirable future.
One hope from the research team is that the scenarios can help practitioners, decision makers, and the next generation of scientists think more holistically about the connections between food, energy, water, and ecosystems and apply that holistic thinking to their work to improve outcomes for nature and human well-being.
“Ultimately, we’re challenging people not to fear transformative thinking for the future,” says Booth. “If people take one thing away from the scenarios, we hope they discover an idea they can rally behind to help realize the future they want.”