Can MAGPIE simulate only one or a few specific countries?

[daggerage]

When running the script, I modified all_iso_countries to include only the countries I wanted to simulate. However, the results still appear to run globally. When exporting ISO-level results using MAGPIE4, I noticed that countries not selected still contain values.

And, does the model allow setting a custom simulation time period? Specifically, can I configure MAGPIE to simulate from 2020 to 2050 instead of the default time range?

Thanks!

[tscheypidi]

The ISO setting in the config serves a different purpose and is made to allow some policies to be only implemented in certain countries. Reducing the set in the config will not lead to a reduction in simulated countries. MAgPIE always does global simulations (to have global trade balanced), but what is possible is to adjust the resolution of the simulation so that the target region is in high resolution and the rest of the world in rather low resolution. This is for instance described in our MAgPIE4 paper for the case of Brazil. What one can do is using a different regional setup, where the less relevant countries are merged into a Rest-of-the-World (ROW) region and assign this region a lower weight in clustering so that less cluster are being assigned to it. As the model preprocessing is currently tied to our HPC at PIK such a different regional setup would need to be coordinated with us.

In terms of time period, it is possible to adjust the period, but the start year has to remain 1995 as we need it at initialization year. Available time step setups can be seen here. "TS_benni" or "5" sound like setups suitable for your application, but you can also add own setups.

[daggerage]

Thank you for your response!

Regarding the country settings: I would like to clarify whether the following approach would be acceptable. In module 15, I have modified the target diet configuration to include only 185 countries. For all other countries, I have set the intake values to 0.

I am not sure whether this setting is valid for the remaining countries, and whether it might affect the overall simulation results?

[tscheypidi]

I don't think that this will work as this would just affect the demand in that countries, not the production and products from these regions could still be traded to other regions.

[daggerage]

Got it!

I noticed that MAgPIE only accounts for demand from FAOSTAT countries, with food demand for non-FAOSTAT countries calibrated to zero (as noted in the documentation: https://rse.pik-potsdam.de/doc/magpie/4.11.0/15_food.htm).

This raises another few questions for me: does this mean that the food demand input for these excluded countries is set to zero in MAgPIE? In other words, are these countries assumed to have no food demand but still able to produce food? If so, could this impact global trade dynamics and MAgPIE’s estimations for land use and other environmental indicators?

[tscheypidi]

the countries we are talking here about are mainly very small island states. In other cases there might be different perceptions between FAO and the official ISO country list of what should be accounted for as separate country and what should be counted as part of other countries. So that our understanding is that this should not affect our overall simulation and having them not set to 0 might even lead to double accounting in some instances. It is indeed a simplification but we think it is a sensible one.