Caption: A new study focuses on forecasting future access to food, water, and energy in 2050.
Image Credit: MIT News; iStock
(CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Scientific Frontline: Extended "At a Glance" Summary: Global Resource Security by 2050
The Core Concept: A predictive study utilizing extensive modeling indicates that by the year 2050, lower-income populations in specific global regions may spend up to 50 percent of their income on food, highlighting severe future disparities in access to food, water, and energy.
Key Distinction/Mechanism: Unlike previous studies that relied on broad "shared socioeconomic pathways," this research utilizes the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) version 7.1 to run 3,735 specific scenarios, allowing for a highly detailed analysis of resource access linked directly to income groups within 32 distinct global regions.
Major Frameworks/Components:
- Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) Version 7.1: An existing framework that models interactions between economies, energy, water, land, and climate across 32 regions, 235 water basins, and 384 land-use regions.
- Multisector Scenario Ensemble: The modeling incorporates 12 primary variables—including population, GDP, income distribution, carbon intensity, and agricultural trade—to generate a wide range of possible resource outcomes.
- Resource Burden Metrics: The study measures the percentage of income required for necessities (e.g., food burden, residential energy burden) to quantify insecurity across different socioeconomic brackets.
Branch of Science: Sustainability Science, Earth Science, Environmental Engineering, and Resource Economics.
Future Application: The scenario-based methodology offers a new roadmap for policymakers, enabling them to identify specific combinations of factors (e.g., land use, water availability, consumer behavior) that create vulnerability in their respective regions, moving beyond analyses that only consider regional averages.
Why It Matters: The findings underscore that future resource security is not driven by a single factor and that lower-income groups face disproportionately high risks; for example, spending half of one's income on food is highly destabilizing, leaving insufficient resources for other basic necessities.
How will global access to food, water, and energy evolve in coming decades? A new study co-authored by MIT researchers suggests the answers could be very different depending on region, resource, and income.
Based on extensive modeling of many different resource scenarios, the study finds that in some regions, lower-income people could be spending roughly 50% of their income on food by the year 2050, in contrast to higher-income groups that could spend about 5% of their income on food in the same areas.
“For a lot of these outcomes, the lower-income groups see much worse potential insecurity,” says Jennifer Morris, a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and the MIT Energy Initiative, and co-author of a new paper detailing the findings. The results, she notes, can be evaluated by policymakers in different global regions to understand what the long-term, large-scale resource security risks may become for different parts of their populations.
“Anything that’s taking up half of your income is potentially destabilizing for your entire life because it leaves so few resources for the other critical needs and basic life necessities,” Morris says.
The study focuses on projecting future access to food, water, and energy, based on long-term variation across 12 major factors influencing their availability, from economic conditions and agriculture production to trade conditions, climate, land use, and more.
“This study shows that there is no single driver of future food, energy, and water insecurity,” says Gi Joo Kim, a research scientist at Tulane University and co-author of the paper. “Income is important, but regional conditions, land use, energy systems, water availability, and consumer behavior all shape the risks people face.” For policymakers, he adds, “This means they need to consider specific combinations of factors that create vulnerability in each region.”
The paper, “Identifying Key Uncertainties and Drivers of Future Resource Security Outcomes Through a Multisector Scenario Ensemble,” appears in the journal Earth’s Future.
In addition to Morris and Kim, the authors include Brian O’Neill, an earth scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Marshall Wise, a systems engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; John Weyant, a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University; and Jonathan Lamontagne, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Tufts University.
Filling a Gap
The current study fills a gap in modeling among scientists studying issues such as long-term resource security. Given the complications of long-term analyses, many studies have used what scientists term “shared socioeconomic pathway” circumstances, a small set of scenarios spanning broad global narratives about the future, rather than exploring specific outcomes such as how long-term resource access may shift in linked fashion across income groups in different regions of the world. Two years ago, the same group of authors wrote a paper calling for more socioeconomically specific scenario analysis focused on outcomes for human well-being; the current study is their effort to develop that kind of modeling.
“For this type of study, where we’re focused on human well-being outcomes, the income piece is really important,” Morris says.
To conduct the study, the researchers adopted an existing framework in the field, the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) version 7.1, which represents interactions between energy, economies, water, land, and climate while dividing the world into 32 regions, 235 water basins, and 384 land-use regions and making adjustments for things like estimated commodity prices over time.
The research group used 12 main variables connected to resource availability, including population, GDP, income distribution, carbon intensity, land use, agricultural trade, multiple energy consumption scenarios, multiple water-use projections, and more. They ran simulations for 3,735 different scenarios involving these factors to better understand the range of possible resource outcomes by 2050.
Broadly, the modeling does uncover some significant regional variations. In 2050, food security may be most acute in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, while energy security could be most acute for low-income residents in some parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.
But within any region, there may still be substantial variation in resource security. In southern Africa, the modeling suggests that the poorest 10% of the population by income could be spending 49.6% of its income on food, compared to just 5.5% for the wealthiest 10% of the population. In West and East Africa, the projected food burden for the bottom 10% of the population in terms of income is projected to be 48.4% and 42.5%, respectively.
To understand the potential change this represents over time, the researchers compared the results to data from the year 2015 in the GCAM model. For the lowest-income group across western Africa in 2015, the average food burden was about 25% of people’s income, compared to estimates for 2050 that range from about 20% to 75% of income. In southern Africa, the lowest-income group spent about 20% of their income on food in 2015, but the scholars’ modeling projects an increase in food burden ranging from 25% to 65% of income. The wide variation in projected burden reflects the wide range in possible future scenarios.
When it comes to energy, variation by income is also apparent. In some parts of the Middle East, for instance, the residential energy burden in 2050 is estimated to be just 1.7% for the highest-income bracket but 18.9% for the lowest-income bracket; in Eastern Europe, the energy burden reaches 11.3% of income for the lowest-income bracket, while resting at under 5% for the highest-income bracket.
“Regional averages can make future resource-security risks appear more manageable than they actually are,” Kim says. “This means analyses that stop at the average may miss exactly the populations most vulnerable to future change.”
Understanding the Dynamics
To be sure, as the scholars emphasize, there are many uncertainties when it comes to resource access, and uncertainty is always part of modeling the global economy and resources. Still, they believe these kinds of projections can provide a more detailed outlook about social conditions in 2050 than has previously been available.
“At the very least, it’s highlighting areas of concern and showing that they differ in different parts of the world,” Morris says. “One of the outputs of this type of study is to map that out and provide that kind of insight. That can also inform the focus of further studies into specific regions and concerns.”
The researchers also believe the results will provide a new roadmap for policymakers who may be concerned about long-term resource provision across the entirety of their societies. While having new projections is valuable, modeling also helps analysts and policymakers see which factors most clearly influence future resource outcomes.
“Our method was designed to identify the conditions that produce different resource security outcomes, rather than to predict one most likely future,” Kim says.
“It’s a different approach to scenarios than we typically see,” Morris adds. “The approach and method have been appealing to people because they have a broad range of uses and applications.”
Funding: The research was supported in part by the US Department of Energy, Stanford University, and the National Research Foundation of Korea.
Published in journal: Earth’s Future
Authors: Gi Joo Kim, Brian O’Neill, Jennifer Morris, Marshall Wise, John Weyant, and Jonathan Lamontagne
Source/Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Peter Dizikes
Edited by: Scientific Frontline
Reference Number: es090826_01
