What does climate change mean for the future of agriculture? Insights from the IMPACT modeling system.

Climate change is one of the biggest and most complex challenges facing agrifood systems. Understanding its potential impacts and identifying possible solutions requires understanding how biophysical and socioeconomic processes interact in multiple locations over time. The global IMPACT modeling system links climate, crop, water, and economic models to explore alternative futures for food and agriculture, is a widely used tool that can help with the challenge of assessing the global agrifood system. IMPACT helps us explore these interactions and identify hotspots of particular concern, how market interactions across regions and commodity sectors may reduce or amplify these effects, and how changes in policy, investment and behavior can help address these challenges.

This webinar, the first in the series “IFPRI Modeling Systems: Informing Future Pathways and Priorities for Agrifood Systems,” co-organized by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the CGIAR Initiative on Foresight, will focus on how IMPACT can be used to analyze how climate impacts on agrifood systems (and particularly crop productivity) may vary both across locations and over time in the coming decades, and how that can inform decisions about policies and investment today.

Opening remarks:

Aditi Mukherji, Director, Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Impact Action Platform, CGIAR.

“Exploring climate change and its impacts on agriculture, with examples from Eastern and Southern Africa.”

• Timothy Thomas, Senior Research Fellow, Foresight and Policy Modeling Unit, IFPRI
• Faaiqa Hartley, Scientist, Foresight and Policy Modeling Unit, IFPRI

User perspective:

Inga Jacobs-Mata,  Director of Water, Growth and Inclusion, International Water Management Institute (IWMI); Lead of the CGIAR Regional Integrated Initiative for East and Southern Africa, Ukama Ustawi.

Keith Wiebe, Senior Research Fellow in the Foresight and Policy Modeling Unit, IFPRI; Lead of the CGIAR Research Initiative on Foresight.

Photo credit: CIAT / Neil Palmer