Local Perceptions of Water-Energy-Food Security: Livelihood Consequences of Dam Construction in Ethiopia

The concept of the water-energy-food (W-E-F) nexus has quickly ascended to become a global framing for resource management policies. Critical studies, however, are questioning its value for assessing the sustainability of local livelihoods. These critiques flow in part from the perception that the majority of influential nexus analyses begin from a large-scale, implicitly top-down perspective on resource dynamics. This can lead to eciency narratives that reinforce existing power dynamics without adequate consideration of local priorities. Here, we present a community-scale perspective on large W-E-F oriented infrastructure. In doing so, we link the current debate on the nexus with alternative approaches to embrace questions of water distribution, political scales, and resource management. The data for this paper come from a survey of 549 households conducted around two large-scale irrigation and hydropower dams in the Upper Blue Nile basin of Ethiopia. The data analysis involved descriptive statistics, logistic analysis, and multinomial logistic analysis. The two case studies presented show that the impact of dams and the perception thereof is socially diverse. Hydropower dams and irrigation schemes tend to enhance social dierences and may therefore lead to social transformation and disintegration. This becomes critical when it leads to higher vulnerability of some groups. To take these social factors/conditions into consideration, one needs to acknowledge the science-policy interface and make the nexus approach more political. The paper concludes that if the nexus approach is to live up to its promise of addressing sustainable development goals by protecting the livelihoods of vulnerable populations, it has to be applied in a manner that addresses the underlying causes that produce winners and losers in large-scale water infrastructure developments

Ageing population and pension system sustainability: reforms and redistributive implications

The paper presents an agent-based model developed to investigate the relationship between retirement age and pension system sustainability taking into account the redistributive implication. Moreover, we investigate the role that the government can play in reducing inequality by implementing debt stabilisation policies, as for example applying a property tax. Results show that delaying the retirement age is an effective policy to raise the pension scheme sustainability. However, there is an emerging trade-off between the pension system sustainability and the extension of the pension benefits that may have intergenerational implications. Pension reforms which reduce the pension age threshold or increase the paid benefit will rise the overall pension expenditure and will negatively affect the public debt evolution which may require some stabilisation measures, as the implementation of positive property taxation. The effects of the property taxation on the debt reduction and the level of equality in the population’s wealth distribution strongly depends on the progressivity of the measure and on the size of the taxpayer population involved. The analysis evidences the crucial role played by the age dependency ratio both in achieving the pension system sustainability and in assuring the wealth distribution within the population

Learning about unprecedented events: Agent-based modelling and the stock market impact of COVID-19

: We model the learning process of market traders during the unprecedented COVID-19 event. We introduce a behavioural heterogeneous agents' model with bounded rationality by including a correction mechanism through representativeness (Gennaioli et al., 2015). To inspect the market crash induced by the pandemic, we calibrate the STOXX Europe 600 Index, when stock markets suffered from the greatest single-day percentage drop ever. Once the extreme event materializes, agents tend to be more sensitive to all positive and negative news, subsequently moving on to close-to-rational. We find that the deflation mechanism of less representative news seems to disappear after the extreme event

Learning about Unprecedented Events: Agent-Based Modelling and the Stock Market Impact of COVID-19

We model the learning process of market traders during the unprecedented COVID-19 event. We introduce a behavioral heterogeneous agents’ model with bounded rationality by including a correction mechanism through representativeness (Gennaioli et al., 2015). To inspect the market crash induced by the pandemic, we calibrate the STOXX Europe 600 Index, when stock markets suffered from the greatest single-day percentage drop ever. Once the extreme event materializes, agents tend to be more sensitive to all positive and negative news, subsequently moving on to close-to-rational. We find that the deflation mechanism of less representative news seems to disappear after the extreme event

The day after tomorrow: mitigation and adaptation policies to deal with uncertainty

The catastrophic events are characterized by “low frequency and high severity”. Nevertheless, during the last decades, both the frequency and the magnitude of these events have been significantly rising worldwide. In 2021, the European Commission adopted a new Strategy on Adaptation to Climate Change aiming to reinforce the adaptive capacity and minimize vulnerability to the effects of climate change and natural catastrophes. In a continuous time framework over an infinite horizon, we solve in closed form the problem of a representative consumer who holds a production technology (firm) and who optimises with respect to both the intertemporal consumption and the mix between an insurance (adaptation) against the magnitude of the catastrophic losses, and an effort strategy (mitigation) aimed at reducing the frequency of such losses. The catastrophic events are modelled as a Poisson jump process. We then propose some numerical simulations calibrated to the country-specific data of the five main European economies (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Netherlands). Our model demonstrates that an optimal mix of mitigation/effort strategies allows to reduce the volatility of the economic growth rate, even if its level may be lowered due to the effort costs. Simulations allow us to also conclude that different countries must optimally react differently to catastrophes, which means that a one-for-all policy does not seem to be optimal

Impact of climate smart agriculture on food security: an agent-based analysis

The study proposes an agent-based model to investigate how adoption of climate smart agriculture (CSA) affects food security. The analysis investigates the role of social and ecological pressures (i.e. community network, climate change and environmental externalities) on the adoption of physical water and soil practices as well as crop rotation technique. The findings reveal that CSA may be an effective strategy to improve the rural populations' well-being for farm households with access to capital, strong social networks and access to integrated food markets. The climate scenario simulations indicate that farmers adopting CSA fare better than non-adopters, although CSA adoption does not fully counterbalance the severe climate pressures. In addition, farmers with poor connections to food markets benefit less from CSA due to stronger price oscillations. These results call for an active role for policy makers in encouraging adaptation through CSA adoption by increasing access to capital, improving food market integration and building social networks

Agroalimentare. Come diminuire l’impronta d’acqua nei prodotti e nei processi

4noThe article provides an overview of the water footprint concept. We describe the Italian water consumption pattern in relation to the global and European trends: Italy is one of the countries with the highest water consumption per capita. The article concludes by describing the key role of agriculture, food production and energy production in water consumption suggesting concrete strategies able to foster a reduction of the water footprint.nonenoneSergio Vergalli, Davide Bazzana, Marta Castellini, Nicola ComincioliVergalli, Sergio; Bazzana, Davide; Castellini, Marta; Comincioli, Nicol