Modeling the decline of labor-sharing in the semi-desert region of Chile
Authored by Marco A Janssen, Andres Baeza
Date Published: 2018
DOI: 10.1007/s10113-017-1243-0
Sponsors:
United States National Science Foundation (NSF)
Platforms:
NetLogo
Model Documentation:
ODD
Flow charts
Mathematical description
Model Code URLs:
https://github.com/abaezacastro/Cooperation_Chile
Abstract
The rapid environmental changes currently underway in many dry regions
of the world, and the deep uncertainty about their consequences,
underscore a critical challenge for sustainability: how to maintain
cooperation that ensures the provision of natural resources when the
benefits of cooperating are variable, sometimes uncertain, and often
limited. In this work, we present the case of a group of rural
communities in a semi-desert region of Chile, where cooperation in the
form of labor-sharing has helped maintain higher agriculture yields,
group cohesion, and identity. Today, these communities face the
challenge of adapting to recurrent droughts, extreme rainfall, and
desertification. We formulated an agent-based model to investigate the
consequences of regional climate changes on the fate of these
labor-exchange institutions. The model, implemented in the framework of
prospect theory, simulates the economic decisions of households to
engage, or not, in labor-sharing agreements under different scenarios of
water supply, water variability, and socio-environmental risk. Results
show that the number of fulfilled labor-sharing agreements is reduced by
water scarcity and environmental variability. More importantly,
defections that involve non-fulfillment of these agreements are more
likely to emerge at the intermediate level of environmental variability
and water supply stress. These results underscore the need for
environmental policy instruments that consider the effects of regional
climate changes on the social dynamics of these communities.
Tags
Agent-based model
Cooperation
Risk
Social-ecological systems
Drought
robustness
Impacts
Framework
Climate-change
Variability
Rainfall
Precipitation
Pastoralists
Labor-sharing