Modeling telecoupled systems: design for simulating telecoupled soybean trade

How to feed the world’s population and achieve environmental sustainability of the planet earth is a global challenge (Godfray et al., 2012). The telecoupling concept and framework are proposed for the fast-growing trend of agricultural trade and other flows between different systems (Liu et al., 2013) and have been applied to a variety of cases (Liu, 2014; Seto and Reenberg, 2014; Wang and Liu, 2016; W. Yang et al., 2016). However, a comprehensive computer simulation model that can represent telecoupled human and natural systems is still lacking. Such a model can permit users to advance the understanding of telecoupling features and help decision making. Therefore, in this paper, we demonstrate the design of a TeleABM (i.e., an ABM that represents telecoupled human and natural systems) to show different components (i.e., coupled systems, flows, agents, causes, and effects) and features of telecoupled systems. Under the framework of telecoupling, we use an ABM as the backbone to guide the construction of TeleABM, and integrate other modeling approaches (e.g., mental modeling and GTAP) to complement their strengths and weaknesses to tackle the challenges of modeling telecoupled systems. We use the soybean trade between China and Brazil as a demonstration of telecoupled systems, where Brazil as the sending country that exports soybeans, China as the receiving system that imports significant amount of soybeans from Brazil.