Overview
The FABLE Calculator focuses on agriculture as the main driver of land-use change. It represents 88 agricultural raw and processed products from the crop and livestock sectors. For each of these products, the model reports the food, feed, other non-food consumption, losses and waste, imports and exports, and production quantities, and related land and water use for each five years from 2000 to 2050.
The main result indicators are the daily calorie consumption per capita, total and by food group; GHG emissions from agriculture and land use change; and land where natural processes predominate as a proxy for biodiversity.
Since 2018 the FABLE Secretariat has developed the FABLE Calculator, as a tool that can be easily and rapidly transferred to any local research team, and ensure maximum transparency:
- It is built in Excel and does not require advanced programming skills.
- It offers everything to compute long-term pathways of food and land use systems, in one file: the database, the computation files, and the visualization of the main results.
- It can test the impacts of numerous alternative assumptions, and compute new results in a few seconds.
- It is pre-filled with global databases that can be later replaced with national datasets, depending on their availability.
All FABLE country teams have used the FABLE Calculator to develop the first generation of pathways towards sustainable land-use and food systems which are presented in the FABLE 2019 Report, and all countries, but India, for the FABLE 2020 Report.
The FABLE Calculator is free and publicly available. You can get started by downloading the demo version and play with different scenarios, including population growth, diets, trade, agricultural productivity, constraints on agricultural expansion, afforestation, protected areas, etc.
If you would like to use a FABLE Calculator for a specific FABLE country, contact the respective country team or send an email to info@unsdsn.org
How does it work?
The principle of the FABLE Calculator is to define several steps of calculation where, except for the first step, all steps are dependent on one or several variable(s) that are computed in the previous steps. For instance, the first step is the computation of the human consumption as this will be used to compute the livestock production and the crop production, and the livestock production is computed before the crop production as the latter will partly depend on the quantity of crops required to feed livestock.
FABLE Calculator resources:
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Updated FABLE Calculator Documentation. Mosnier et al. 2020.
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Video training materials in English and Spanish for researchers and policymakers.
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FABLE Calculator Forum. Register to the Calculator forum to ask specific questions on the tool and learn from previous questions.