AgriLOVE: Agriculture, land-use and technical change in an evolutionary, agent-based model

Matteo Coronese, Martina Occelli, Francesco Lamperti and Andrea Roventini

Ecological Economics, 2023, vol. 208, issue C

Abstract: This paper presents a dynamic agent-based model of land use and agricultural production under environmental boundaries, finite available resources and endogenous technical change. In particular, we model a spatially explicit smallholder farming system populated by boundedly-rational agents competing and innovating to fulfill an exogenous demand for food, while coping with a changing environment shaped by their production choices. Given the strong technological and environmental uncertainty, agents learn and adaptively employ heuristics which guide their decisions on engaging in innovation and imitation activities, hiring workers, acquiring new farms, deforesting virgin areas and abandoning unproductive lands. Such activities in turn impact farm productivity, food production, food prices and land use. We firstly show that the model can replicate key stylized facts of the agricultural sector. We then extensively explore its properties across several scenarios featuring different institutional and behavioral settings. Finally, we simulate the model across different applications considering deforestation and land abandonment; human-induced soil degradation; and climate impacts. AgriLOVE offers a flexible simulation environment to study the endogenous emergence of different agricultural production regimes from the interaction of spatially dispersed farms subject to resource constraints, spatial influence and climate change.

Keywords: Agriculture; Land use; Agent-based model; Technological change; Environmental boundaries; Sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Working Paper: AgriLOVE: agriculture, land-use and technical change in an evolutionary, agent-based model (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:208:y:2023:i:c:s0921800923000198

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2023.107756

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