Systemic Risk Analysis of Agriculture with Climate and Other Stressors

Climate and other stressors such as aging facilities, population shifts, political tensions, and technological advancements compound challenges affecting logistics systems, including availability and sourcing of food and water supplies. Ensuring availability of resources is critical to maintaining economic and social balances. For arid regions, particularly those with transboundary watersheds, identifying and addressing risks to the agriculture sector due to water scarcity is critical. The complexities surrounding resource allocation cross a multitude of high-level system inputs and outputs. This paper develops a method of evaluating the sensitivities of agriculture system order to water scarcity and other stressors, focusing on grain crop production in Iraq. The method incorporates various socioeconomic factors in addition to hydrology data to test the impact of scenarios on system order. The results include identifying scenarios that most and least matter, in support of policy, investment, and other decision-making. Tracking of these scenarios helps to ensure the food and water security of Iraq. The paper is relevant to the variety of systems engineering applications that are addressing hybrid threats in planning and operations for complex and interdependent systems.