Andrew Reid Bell

Boston University | BU · Earth & Environment

A major impediment to understanding human-environment interactions is that data on social systems are not collected in a way that is easily comparable to natural systems data. While many environmental variables are collected with high frequency, gridded in time and space, social data is typically conducted irregularly, in waves that are far apart i...

To date, projections of human migration induced by sea-level change (SLC) largely suggest large-scale displacement away from vulnerable coastlines. However, results from our model of Bangladesh suggest counterintuitively that people will continue to migrate toward the vulnerable coastline irrespective of the flooding amplified by future SLC under a...

Improving environmental stewardship requires improvement of the options available down to the poorest resource users. Agriculture will no longer be the path to development and better options that it once was, without rethinking how and where to intervene. An iconic video game provides a lens into how this can happen. (Read-only, open access link)...

Paying resource users to preserve features of their environment could in theory better align production and conservation goals. We show, however, that across a range of conservation dilemmas, they might not. We conduct a synthesis of dynamic games experiments built around collective action dilemmas in conservation, played across Europe, Africa, and...

There has so far been no shared understanding of validity in agent-based simulation. We here conceptualise validation as systematically substantiating the premises on which conclusions from simulation analysis for a particular modelling context are built. Given such a systematic perspective, validity of agent-based models cannot be ensured if valid...

Reconciling conflicts between wildlife conservation and other human activities is a pervasive, multifaceted issue. Large carnivores, such as the African lion Panthera leo are often the focus of such conflicts as they have significant ecological and cultural value but impose severe social and financial costs on the communities that live alongside th...

Agent-based models are used in a huge diversity of contexts, which complicates the establishment of a shared understanding of model validity and adequate methods for model construction, inference and validation. Starting from the widely accepted tenet that model validity can only be judged with respect to a well-defined modelling purpose and contex...

The purpose of this article is to explore how migration theory is invoked in empirical studies of climate-related migration, and to provide suggestions for engagement with theory in the emerging field of climate mobility. Theory is critical for understanding processes we observe in social-ecological systems because it points to a specific locus of...

The most significant investment in improved water governance for Pakistan in recent decades—irrigation management transfer under the PIDA Act of 1997—ended with repeal in 2019 in the province of Punjab. Before embarking on the next major experiment, we wish to examine what the opportunity space for improvement in Pakistan’s water governance is. We...

Globally water use in agriculture is inefficient, with problems more pronounced in the global south. Pakistan's Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS) is a noteworthy case, withdrawing over 95% of the surface water resource. The Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS) is a vast gravity irrigation system with next to no volumetric measurement and low, ar...

Conventional agricultural practices – especially conventional tillage – are a major driver of soil erosion globally. While soil may not frequently considered a vulnerable natural resource, the erosion and degradation of soils poses a serious threat to food production and the production of numerous otherin situ andex situ ecosystem services. This st...

Clearing forests for swidden agriculture, despite providing food to millions of farmers in the tropics, can be a major driver of deforestation. Payments for ecosystem services schemes can help stop swidden agriculture-induced forest loss by rewarding forest users for maintaining forests. Clear and secure property rights are a key prerequisite for t...

Conflicts between biodiversity conservation and other human activities are multifaceted. Understanding farmer preferences for various conflict mitigation strategies is therefore critical. We developed a novel interactive game around farmer land management decisions across 18 villages in Gabon to examine responses to three elephant conflict mitigati...

Virtually all climate monitoring and forecasting efforts concentrate on hazards rather than on impacts, while the latter are a priority for planning emergency activities and for the evaluation of mitigation strategies. Effective disaster risk management strategies need to consider the prevailing “human terrain” to predict who is at risk and how com...

Conflicts between the objectives of agricultural production and conservation are becoming increasingly complex. Of vital importance to the success of conflict interventions is a detailed understanding of how stakeholders react to management interventions as well as the influence of interacting social and political factors. Across Europe, goose popu...

This paper accompanies the workshop on "New Tools or New Research Culture? Towards an Integration First approach to modelling social-environmental systems," and details the outcomes of a small scale workshop at The James Hutton Institute on "Modular, Integrated Agent-Based Social-Ecological Modelling." The latter workshop was predicated on the long...

This chapter identifies core principles of ecology and environmental science applicable to the nexus and discusses the tightly coupled socio-ecological systems that establish ecosystems services (ES) within the nexus. The chapter begins by outlining key ecological principles and their interdependencies, demonstrating how ecosystem services are prov...

Improving quality of life of farmers in rapidly changing rural economies remains a challenge. In low income settings, agricultural lean seasons lead to a fall in consumption and nutrition that affect longer term well-being trajectories. However, human well-being goes beyond material wealth, and increasingly subjective well-being is measured to refl...

Humanity is exceeding the planetary boundary for nitrogen. Changing course will depend, in part, on how current and future smallholders manage nitrogen. Precision agriculture could play a key role but only if accompanied by policy reforms and investments that address a range of barriers to improved nitrogen management.

High-frequency social data collection may facilitate improved recall, more inclusive reporting, and improved capture of intra-period variability. Although there are examples of small studies collecting particular variables at high frequency in the social science literature, to date there have been no significant efforts to collect a wide range of v...

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The name of “Md. Ehsanul Haque Tamal” is now corrected in the author group of this article. The original article has been corrected.

Chapter 2 makes the case for using systems thinking as a guiding perspective for TEEBAgriFood’s development of a comprehensive Evaluation Framework for the eco-agri-food system. Many dimensions of the eco-agri-food system create complex analytical and policy challenges. Systems thinking allows better understanding and forecasting of the outcomes of...

This study examines the relationship between water security features and irrigation investment using data from a field survey with a choice experiment conducted in rural Pakistan. Our results generally support Besley’s framework on the link between property right and investment incentive with an application to irrigation, although not all aspects o...

Conservation agriculture (CA) is a management paradigm in which soil is covered outside of cropping seasons, minimally disturbed, and recharged with nitrogen-fixing legumes. Finding effective ways to encourage CA is a centuries-old problem playing out acutely today in Sub-Saharan Africa. To better understand this issue, we have collected data on ru...

Non-technical summary A major challenge in addressing the loss of benefits and services provided by the natural environment is that it can be difficult to find ways for those who benefit from them to pay for their preservation. We examine one such context in Malawi, where erosion from soils disturbed by agriculture affects not only farmers’ incomes...

Background Insect pest problems are among the main causes of crop yield losses in global agriculture. Insecticides protect households from food-security and income shocks, but can induce human health and environmental risks. Semi-subsistence farm households (SSFHs), which farm for both consumption and market, make decisions about crop management an...

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is an approach for developing agricultural strategies to secure sustainable food security under climate change. CSA has three inter-related objectives, where the first two objectives are emphasised in low-income situations: 1. Food security: sustainably increasing crop yields and productivity and improving farmer in...

Adoption of the trinity of practices known commonly today as conservation agriculture (CA)-maintaining soil cover, reducing tillage, and enhancing soil nitrogen through legumes-is a critical process to the management of erosion in rural landscapes, and maintenance of aquatic habitats and hydropower potential. However, the large literature on the be...

The TEEBAgriFood ‘Scientific and Economic Foundations’ report addresses the core theoretical issues and controversies underpinning the evaluation of the nexus between the agri-food sector, biodiversity and ecosystem services and externalities including human health impacts from agriculture on a global scale. It argues the need for a ‘systems thinki...

Land degradation and soil erosion have emerged as serious challenges to smallholder farmers throughout Southern Africa. To combat these challenges, conservation agriculture (CA) – a suite of agricultural practices consisting of zero tillage, mulching of crop residues, and intercropping with legumes – is widely promoted as a “sustainable” package of...

A range of tools exists for collecting data to inform decision processes in agent-based models (ABMs), each appropriate to modeling processes at particular scales and each with particular strengths and limitations. The issue of which tools are appropriate to which goals has been discussed in the literature at several points over the last decade, bu...

The advent of cheap smartphones in rural areas across the globe presents an opportunity to change the mode with which researchers engage hard-to-reach populations. In particular, smartphones allow researchers to connect with respondents more frequently than standard household surveys, opening a new window into important short-term variability in ke...

Task list and versioning. (DOCX)

The contribution of synthetic pesticides to closing yield gaps around the world is undeniable; however, their use is also a classic double-edged sword. Beyond the well-recognized social costs (e.g., pollution to soil and water, and health effects both on consumers and other species) there are also private costs on farmers beyond the direct costs of...

Conventional wisdom in many agricultural systems across the world is that farmers cannot, will not, or should not pay the full costs associated with surface water delivery. Across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, only a handful can claim complete recovery of operation, maintenance, and capital costs; across C...

Coastal Bangladesh faces an increasing number of challenges including cyclones, tidal surges, floods, drought, saline water intrusion, waterlogging and land subsidence, which pose substantial threats to the livelihoods of the coastal inhabitants. In addition to these threats, profound social and land-use changes are complicating the livelihoods of...

Rates of adoption of pro-environmental practices in agriculture in many parts of the world are low. In some cases, this is attributable to the private costs borne by farmers to adopt these practices, often well in advance of any benefits - public or private - that they may bring. Monetary incentives, such as through payments-for-ecosystem services...

There is a great deal of interest in increasing food security through the sustainable intensification of food production in developing countries around the world. One such approach is through Conservation Agriculture (CA), which improves soil quality through a suite of farming practices that reduce soil disturbance, increase soil cover through reta...

Two current processes of institutional reform - irrigation management transfer (IMT) and the 18th Amendment to Pakistan's Constitution - are expected to significantly impact agriculture and irrigation in Pakistan. Results are analyzed from a net-map exercise conducted with water-sector experts at the federal and provincial (Punjab) scales. The data...

Shifting agricultural land management to one that promotes the use of biological control alongside insecticide spray, requires two key elements: 1) habitat for natural enemies provided by non-crop area within the agricultural landscape, and 2) judicious use of insecticides by farmers. However, barriers to adoption may include low levels of knowledg...

In this study, we focus on water quality as a vehicle to illustrate the role that the water, energy, and food (WEF) Nexus perspective may have in promoting ecosystem services in agriculture. The mediation of water quality by terrestrial systems is a key ecosystem service for a range of actors (municipalities, fishers, industries, and energy provide...

Green Revolution technologies transformed Bangladesh’s agricultural system through the introduction of high-yielding rice and wheat varieties, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the expansion of tubewell-irrigated area, enabling crop production during the dry season. However, serious challenges continue to plague the agriculture sector, inclu...

The Indus Basin Irrigation System suffers significant inequity in access to surface water across its millions of users. Information, i.e., monitoring and reporting of water availability, may be of value in improving conditions across the basin, and we investigated this via an experimental game of water distribution in Punjab, Pakistan. We found evi...

CHAPTER 15 Highlights  Men and women differ in interests, mechanisms, roles, and strategies for dealing with climate change impacts  Men and women have different perceptions of space due to their productive and reproductive roles, power relations, and to historical and environmental contexts that shape the local 'theory of place'  Participatory...

Malawi faces significant challenges in meeting its future food security needs because there is little scope for increasing production by simply expanding the area under cultivation. One potential alternative for sustainably intensifying agricultural production is by means of conservation agriculture (CA), which improves soil quality through a suite...

Land uses that replace tropical forests are important determinants of terrestrial carbon storage and biodiversity. This includes secondary forest growth after deforestation, which has been integrated into the REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) concept as a means to enhance current forest carbon stocks. Incorporatin...

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Choice Experiment Blocks and Irrigation Choice Experiment Questionnaire

It is widely argued that farmers are unwilling to pay adequate fees for surface water irrigation to recover the costs associated with maintenance and improvement of delivery systems. In this paper, we use a discrete choice experiment to study farmer preferences for irrigation characteristics along two branch canals in Punjab Province in eastern Pak...

Pakistan hosts the world’s largest irrigation system, but it is fraught with issues of inequity and inefficiency. Several recent processes of institutional reform are expected to have significant impacts on the agriculture and irrigation sector, namely the process of Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) and the 18th Amendment to the Pakistan Consti...

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Proxy-based climate reconstructions can extend instrumental records by hundreds of years, providing a wealth of climate information at high temporal resolution. To date, however, their usefulness for informing climate risk and variability in policy and social applications has been understudied. Here, we apply tree-ring based reconstructions of drou...

Irrigation is central to Pakistan’s agriculture; and managing the country’s canal, ground, and surface water resources in a more efficient, equitable, and sustainable way will be crucial to meeting agricultural production challenges, including increasing agricultural productivity and adapting to climate change. The water component of the Internatio...

Six water emergencies have occurred since 1981 for the New York City (NYC) region despite the following: 1) its perhumid climate, 2) substantial conservation of water since 1979, and 3) meteorological data showing little severe or extreme drought since 1970. This study reconstructs 472 years of moisture availability for the NYC watershed to place t...

River basin organizations serve as potential forums to promote adaptation to environmental change in transboundary river basins. Yet how these organizations adapt is an understudied area of the literature. We explore and compare four examples of adaptation within the Mekong River Commission (MRC), focusing on how the nature of stressors shapes adap...

Climate change impacts on dry season streamflow in the Mekong River are relatively understudied, despite the fact that water availability during this time is critically important for agricultural and ecological systems. Analyses of two gauging stations (Vientiane and Kratie) in the Lower Mekong Basin (LMB) show significant positive correlations bet...

The depth of the 2006–9 drought in the humid, southeastern US left several metropolitan areas with only a 60–120 day water supply. To put the region's recent drought variability in a long-term perspective, a dense and diverse tree-ring network—including the first records throughout the Apalachicola–Chattahoochee–Flint river basin—is used to reconst...

The link between ineffective forest monitoring and forest degradation is well known. Under REDD+, monitoring stands to become more important as a means of maintaining incentive. Little attention however has been paid to the possible adverse consequences of forest monitoring. Our research develops a spatially explicit, agent-based model (ABM) of tim...

a b s t r a c t In its continuing move toward resource independence, Mongolia has recently entered a new agricul-tural era. Large crop fields and center-pivot irrigation have been established in the last 10 years across Mongolia's "Breadbasket": the Bulgan, Selenge and Tov aimags of northcentral Mongolia. Since meteo-rological records are typically...