By Shahnila Islam
Trends in population and income growth along with climate change pose significant risks to achieving sustainable food security. As challenges to the agricultural sector grow, we need improved tools to understand the risks, and to evaluate alternative solutions to mitigate some of these risks. In order for these tools to be useful, they need to capture the reality of a sector where farmers react to both biophysical changes in crop productivity, as well as to the economic impacts from the market they face.
In a new paper titled “Structural Approaches to Modeling the Impact of Climate Change and Adaptation Technologies and Crop Yields and Food Security”, Islam et al. (2016) look at the “structural approach” (Figure 1). This is a modeling method that combines both biophysical and economic modeling in order to answer some of the questions related to how climate change may affect agricultural production and what role improved crop varieties may have to reduce some of the negative impacts. The authors found that adoption of drought and heat tolerant maize, wheat, potatoes, sorghum, and groundnut in select countries have the potential to reduce the negative impacts from climate change, even though the biophysical yield gains are dampened through market responses.
Figure 1: Primary components of the structural approach used in research on climate impacts in agriculture and food systems.
The work in this in paper was possible due to our long-term collaboration with partner centers across the CGIAR and the collaboration of a multi-disciplinary team through the Global Futures & Strategic Foresight (GFSF) program. The methodology enabled us to combine information from crops trials to parameterize alternative drought and heat tolerant technologies into crop models (in this case the DSSAT crop model). The link between crop models and the IMPACT economic model (Robinson et al., 2015) allowed us to take into consideration market effects, and therefore obtain a better estimate of production following adoption of these improved varieties, as well as estimate effects on world prices and trade.
Global Futures and Strategic Foresight (GFSF) is a CGIAR initiative led by IFPRI and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions and Markets (PIM), and the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).
References
Islam, S., Cenacchi, N., Sulser, T.B., Gbegbelegbe, S., Hareau, G., Kleinwechter, U., Mason-D'Croz, D., Nedumaran, S., Robertson, R., Robinson, S. and Wiebe, K., 2016. Structural approaches to modeling the impact of climate change and adaptation technologies on crop yields and food security. Global Food Security, 10, pp.63-70.
Robinson, S., Mason-D’Croz, D., Islam, S., Cenacchi, N., Creamer, B., Gueneau, A., Hareau, G., Kleinwechter, U., Mottaleb, K., Nedumaran, S., Robertson, R., Rosegrant, M.W., Gbegbelegbe, S., Sulser, T.B., and Wiebe, K., 2015b. New Crop Varieties and Climate Change Adaptation: Ex-Ante Analysis of Promising and Alternative Technologies. IFPRI Discussion Paper Series, Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
