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The Consequences of Misrepresenting Feedbacks in Coupled Human and Environmental Models

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Monday, February 18, 2019, 3 pm

This is a past event.

 

Environmental Engineering Graduate Seminar

 

Dr. Jenny Apriesnig, Assistant Professor, School of Business & Economics, Michigan Technological University

 

Abstract:


Feedbacks between the ecosystem and the economy are important to consider when measuring impacts from a disturbance but are often omitted from general equilibrium bioeconomic models. These models usually focus on how humans respond to ecological change, but do not consider that in adapting to changed conditions, humans can further affect the ecosystem. We present a framework that couples a regionally specified computable general equilibrium model and an Ecopath with Ecosim food web model and includes bidirectional feedbacks between the two systems. Our bioeconomic model uniquely represents a comprehensive mapping of the entire regional economy, including recreational and commercial fishing, harvest quotas, and fish biomass in the economic system. We simulate the bioeconomic impacts of a potential Asian carp invasion of Lake Erie’s food web and regional economy with and without bidirectional feedbacks between the economy and the ecosystem. Including bidirectional feedbacks is as representative of the real world as possible within the model, and results in a decline in welfare across the region of 4.53%. When feedbacks are omitted there are large ecological variations in projected populations of most target species. We find that the magnitude of the difference in biomass projections increases as a species’ fishing-effort intensity increases. Results demonstrate the need to model bidirectional feedbacks between the economy and the ecosystem to forecast both economic and ecological impacts; omission of these feedbacks may appear to be economically trivial yet have large ecological consequences.

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  • Angela Keranen

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