Project description
Climate change impact assessment on food trade
Climate change is bound to have devastating effects on crop yields. A warming world is bad for farming with more frequent heavy rainfall possibly flooding fields and increased humidity spreading crop disease. The EU-funded CIFTRESS project will investigate joint climate, agro-environmental and economic induced changes to the trade network of five staple foods: maize, rice, wheat, barley and soybeans in the European and Mediterranean region up to the year 2050. It will draw on crop yield and economic trade modelling, as well as network science and quantitative scenario building approaches. The project will review the resilience and security of the network topologies of current and future scenarios for staple food trade.
Objective
Global climate change adversely affects crop yields and undermines humanity’s food security and resilience; while previous research has focused on regional agricultural adaptation, the opportunities and vulnerabilities of trade networks have remained less explored. In this vein, this research examines the joint climate, agro-environmental, and economic induced changes to the trade network topologies of five staple foods, i.e. maize, rice, wheat, barley, and soybeans, up to the year 2050 in the European and Mediterranean region. This proposed research adopts an interdisciplinary methodology drawing on crop yield modeling, economic trade modeling, network science, and quantitative scenario building approaches. More specifically, this research will enhance the International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT) Model with fitness network formation and gravity trade models to reveal the regional origin and destination of staple commodities. Through the enhanced model, the network topologies of current and future scenario staple food trade will be investigated and linked to the notions of resilience and security. Scenarios describing alternative dynamics of staple food trade network topologies for each crop will be developed through a comprehensive literature review focusing on agricultural trends, investments, and regional strategies and semi-structured interviews with agro-economists, agriculture policy specialists, and agricultural trade practitioners. The main innovations of this research project are the enhancement of the IMPACT model and in addition, the application of network analysis to interpret the ‘in-direct’ trade flow relationships which are not well captured by the current model. This will enable an analysis of climate change impacts on staple food trade in the light of the network-based configurations of network efficiency, redundancy, and modularity which are linked to the notions of food resilience and security.
Fields of science
- natural sciencesmathematicspure mathematicstopology
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencesnutrition
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringinformation engineeringtelecommunicationstelecommunications networks
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculture
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinator
30123 Venezia
Italy