Meeting Global Challenges Together
July 26, 2023
To Tom Hertel, our main task for the future is both simple and daunting: “Feeding the world while protecting the environment.”
Hertel is a distinguished professor of agricultural economics and founder and executive director of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP), a network of more than 26,000 researchers in nearly every country on earth. GTAP maintains databases and models on international economic policy, which can be used for a multitude of research purposes, including examining climate and food issues.
Achieving sustainable food and water supplies is, by necessity, an interdisciplinary project, Hertel says. Take this example: an ecologist is working on the impacts of converting natural lands to farming, an entomologist is researching the reduction in pollinators and an economist is analyzing the global food trade. These three people are studying interrelated phenomena: environmental degradation diminishes pollinator populations, which makes agriculture less productive, which requires more cropland and results in disruptions to global food chains.
Hertel’s current passion project is all about connections. Called GLASSNET (Global to Local Analysis of Systems Sustainability, a Network of networks), it’s funded by the National Science Foundation to build networks of people working on global food, water and environmental challenges across disciplinary and national boundaries.
“We’re doing global economic analysis over here; they’re doing global ecological analysis over there,” Hertel says. “We need to be brought together. That's the mission.”
Across campus, Matt Huber, a climate scientist and co-principal investigator on the GLASSNET project with Hertel and other economists, leads another interdisciplinary initiative.
Huber is professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences and director of Purdue’s new Institute for a Sustainable Future (ISF). ISF addresses global sustainability by integrating climate, environment and food-energy-water security work.