The scenarios
The RE4AFAGRI consortium designed three core scenarios at the center of the modelling efforts:
Baseline: the baseline scenario represents an extrapolation of recent trends into the future, and it is useful to highlight potential challenges in absence of changes in trends (e.g.,remaining gap in energy, water access and adequate nutrition).
Improved access: some efforts are made to improve the quality of living in the case-study country, by increasing energy, water, and sanitation access so that the access gap estimated in the baseline(percentage of population remaining without access)is at least halved by 2030. A food nutrition target also aims at ensuring domestic food production by improving crop yields through irrigation.
Ambitious development: this scenario includes ambitious and ideal targets of universal access to electricity, water, and sanitation by 2030, and domestic agriculture production improving to meet decent living nutrition standards (EAT Lancet diet). In addition, measures to guarantee 100% renewable electricity generation are in place. This scenario ensemble includes different levels of ambitions in improving the production and access to electricity, water infrastructure and water for agriculture, with different grades of investment requirements or secondary impacts on natural resources (e.g., coal or water withdrawals). Additional scenarios can be run upon interest from the modelling team and stakeholders to assess the sensitivity to specific model parameters (e.g., technology costs) or to address specific questions (e.g., intensification vs extensification of agriculture, or achieving targets in 2030 and or 2050 etc.)