By Nhuong Tran (WorldFish)
The Global Futures and Strategic Foresight Program (GSFS) held a training workshop on the IMPACT Fish model at WorldFish headquarters in Penang from Aug 25-29, 2015. Five participants attended, including staff from WorldFish and partner institutions in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. The purpose of the training workshop was to deliver the latest version of the IMPACT fishery and aquaculture model to WorldFish’s modeling team. The model is the result of a collaborative effort between IFPRI, FAO, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, and the World Bank, and serves as an interim step for developing WorldFish modeling capacity and the full fish module for the updated version of IMPACT.
From left to right: Chan Chin Yee (WorldFish, Penang), Khondker Murshed-E-Jahan (WorldFish Bangladesh), Miroslav Batka, Tran Van Nhuong (WorldFish Penang), Nguyen Van Giap (Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agriculture and Rural Development, Vietnam), Tridoyo Kusumastanto (Bogor Agriculture University, Indonesia)| Copyright: WorldFish
Throughout the week-long training, Miroslav Batka from IFPRI led participants to walk through the model from methodological framework, underlying economic theory, database assembly, systems of equations, and the logic of the GAMS programming code. Approaches to baseline and alternative scenarios development and calibration via the GAMS code were also introduced to workshop attendees. With their diverse expertise of working in fisheries and aquaculture sector, participants shared ideas on how to improve the model calibration with respect to industry-specific biophysical and socio-economic limits, such as environmental and ecosystem carrying capacity and socio-economic targets defined by national governments, among other dimensions. This training workshop is part of the Global Futures and Strategic Foresight project’s emphasis on collaboration among modeling teams at the different CGIAR centers. In the 2015-16 work-plan, WorldFish’s modeling team will use the model to generate projections to 2050 for a report on fish and aquaculture in the ASEAN region.
Participants: Tran Van Nhuong (WorldFish Penang HQ), Chan Chin Yee (WorldFish Penang HQ), Khondker Murshed-E-Jahan (WorldFish Bangladesh), Nguyen Van Giap (Southern Center of Agriculture Policy and Strategy, Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agriculture and Rural Development, Vietnam), and Tridoyo Kusumastanto (Bogor Agricultural University, Bogor, Indonesia).
Also, WorldFish colleagues recently published an interesting infographic on Indonesian aquaculture. Check it out here: http://worldfishcenter.org/content/indonesias-aquaculture-sector.
