Agricultural & Resource Economics

AREC faculty Andrew Plantinga, Bill Jaeger, JunJie Wu, and Christian Langpap recently received a share of a $4.3 million grant to study climate change, population growth, and water availability in the Willamette River Basin. The five-year study, called Willamette Water 2100, is funded by the National Science Foundation. The share of the grant going to the AREC department is approximately $750,000.

Oregon State University, PSU, and U of O participate in the study, which will determine the possible constraint on water supply in the future, as global warming and population growth strain available supplies. The study ultimately asks “How is scarcity going to express itself in the future?” says Plantinga.

AREC faculty will aim to quantify the economic demand for water in the Willamette Basin by primary users, which include both those within the agricultural industry and urban users, as well as the use needed for maintaining healthy fish and watershed ecology. The study will use a computer-modeling tool called Envision, developed at OSU by faculty in the Biological and Environmental Engineering department. Envision can combine sub-models of economic, hydrological, ecological, and climate systems to analyze multiple scenarios which may arise in the future. The goal for the AREC team is to develop economic decision models that explain how decisions are shaped by the availability of water, as well as how human decisions affect water availability. The study will project water demand and scarcity metrics for the next 90 years, which will be challenging as there will likely be significant change in land use regulations, water rights, and prices in that amount of time.  According to Jaeger, these land use factors significantly impact how society uses water.

The grant will positively impact AREC graduate students, as many will be working on segments of the study as part of master’s and doctoral theses. Additionally, there is potential to incorporate various aspects of the study in undergraduate classes.