By Daniel Mason-D’Croz (IFPRI)
Argentinian Counterparts
In early December, Daniel Mason-D’Croz presented at the second annual International Conference on Agro-Industrial Projections hosted by INAI (www.inai.org.ar, www.inai.org.ar/notas.asp?id=193) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This is the second year that Daniel has presented at the conference and is a part of building collaboration with the economic modeling team at INAI. In 2014, Daniel presented a selection of results from studies considering the effects of adopting new crop technologies (Rosegrant et al 2014, and Robinson et al 2015). In this second conference, Daniel presented a selection of preliminary results from the upcoming IMPACT baseline scenarios and highlighted the new features available in IMPACT 3 (www.ifpri.org/program/impact-model) along with recent improvements and updates to the climate scenarios that now include results across all representative concentration pathways (RCPs) from the IPCC’s 5th assessment report.
Global Colleagues
In addition to the day of presentations discussing agricultural projections, a follow-up modeling meeting was held where representatives from a variety of modeling teams, including OECD-FAO, IFPRI, INAI, and others, discussed the modeling philosophies and ongoing work being done by the different teams. Daniel presented work being done in collaboration with ILRI through the GFSF project to improve the IMPACT livestock module as well as work connecting IMPACT to country land-use models as was done in Colombia (blog post, report).
Climate Change in Context
Changing climate is not just affecting agriculture through the direct effects of changing temperatures and precipitation. The ½ degree increase we have already observed is leading to changes in the distribution of plant pests and diseases as new areas have become hospitable to new plagues. These transitions are likely to increase as temperatures increase even more, and they won’t just be limited to plant pests and diseases. Increasing temperatures will likely lead to spreading of tropical diseases (i.e. dengue, malaria, etc.) to higher latitudes in both the northern and southern temperate zones. These changes, among many others, could have many unexpected impacts that would greatly alter the way our global economy and society function. As a part of the International Grains Forum (www.igc.int/en/about/aboutus-pressrelease.aspx, www.igcargentina.com/eng/index.html), Daniel presented a few of these many challenges that face our global food system to help provide context of the nearer term challenges that climate change presents in addition to the longer term challenges that we so often focus on as a part of the Global Futures and Strategic Foresight project.
Please see the slides presented here:
This work was supported by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the CGIAR Research Programs on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) and Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) to Global Futures and Strategic Foresight Program (GFSF).
