ACPAR: A framework for linking national water and food security management with global conditions

•ACPAR is a multi-objective simulation-optimization framework for cropping pattern planning to improve national water and food security;•The application of the framework to Egypt shows the necessity of increasing the area cultivated by wheat in the future;•ACPAR generates cropping patterns that outperform the historical cropping pattern of Egypt under wide future conditions. In this paper, we identify cropping pattern as a major policy variable. A framework for the generation of alternative cropping patterns (ACPs) in arid regions, called ACPAR, is developed for assessing water and food security. ACPAR is applied to the case study of Egypt, for which a simulation-based national water, food, and trade (NWFT) model exists. ACPAR is formulated to minimize the agricultural water demand, food imports, and the economic cost of imports as well as maximize the national gross margin of agriculture. These four objective functions are optimized to generate ACPs that have different tradeoffs. Additional filtering criteria are employed to account for fertilizer use as well as the stability of the set objectives. The ACPs are generated and evaluated for the baseline period (1986-2013) as well as under future conditions up to the year 2050. The results show that ACPAR is useful for proposing ACPs that could have worked better for Egypt during the baseline period, but also ACPs that outperform the historical cropping pattern in each objective function for wide future conditions. Some of the generated future ACPs can perform well regarding irrigation water use and cost of imports, without compromising food self-sufficiency. The quantified tradeoffs between the identified objective functions are the key contributions of this study, representing important information for policymakers to aid in water resources planning. The ACPAR framework connects national water resource management decisions to global food production, consumption, and trade dynamics.