Economic Support for the Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land-Use, and Energy (FABLE) Consortium
FABLE is a new multi-institutional effort to strengthen global capacity in analytics and economic modeling to inform sustainable agriculture and land use planning. The FABLE Consortium, which is led by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, works with country and regional teams to evaluate tradeoffs of land use pathways that consider a broad range of sustainable development goals, including biodiversity conservation, improved nutrition through healthy diets, and climate change mitigation. FABLE’s inaugural report describes the Consortium’s objectives and summarizes results from a coordinated multi-country assessment of sustainable land use pathways.
Over the last year, CEnREP affiliate Justin Baker has co-led U.S.-focused efforts to support the FABLE Consortium in collaboration with researchers from The Nature Conservancy, UC San Diego, and RTI International. Building on the initial FABLE report, current efforts are underway to develop a new US land use modeling system to enable more robust land use assessments across a wide range of sustainable development considerations. Furthermore, Dr. Baker is involved in a coordinated FABLE effort to evaluate the implications of bilateral trade policy assumptions on sustainable agriculture and land use planning, including the potential implications of alternative trade futures on land-based mitigation strategies and healthy diet transitions.